A playwright, his play and Darwin

In his latest offering, playwright Chetan Shah wanted it to give rise to introspection and discussion. ELIZABETH ROY examines whether it has worked.

CHENNAI waited patiently (literally for years!) for Chetan Shah to complete the writing of his latest play, "The Lizard Waltz", his contribution to the decade of the brain. At long last it went into rehearsal, directed by Bhagirathi Narayanan for the Madras Players, with Chetan pruning and refining the script on-line. The play opened last month. It was worth the wait. It has style and class.

Chetan, who read Philosophy at Cambridge, continues to be its serious student, often locked in passionate debates over who you are or how you see, whether reductionism can refine social institutions and moral reactions, how cultural institutions emerge through evolutionary processes ...

In "The Lizard Waltz" Chetan consolidated his years of reflection and the ideas that could be translated into the dictates of dramatic form and into the context of his story. Underlying the several levels at which the play operates is the basic notion that while human beings have evolved considerably, the basic ways in which they act and react seem to have been hard-wired into their minds based on evolutionary or survival requirements of the time. The issue in question being, can one really overcome these basic or primal instincts?

The play sets the core idea in contemporary racy times, in a TV studio. Oberoi, into his midlife, heads the network and is engaged in a passionate affair with a vibrant young chat-show hostess. Oberoi's wife, Radha, who owns the company, feels wronged and demands her pound of flesh, drawing strength from her Swamiji's voice of spiritualism. Oberoi, uninitiated into political correctness, believes he is being excessively punished for a minor goof. The other characters are Param, a young engineer in the studio in single-minded pursuit of the attractive co-anchor and the primal act of propagation. At the centre is Dhiren, anchor of an agony programme, which attempts to bring the spirit of scientific rationalism to bear on people's emotional problems. The plot shows the kinds of pain that people are suffering and inflicting on each other, because they let themselves be driven by their primal instincts, whether sex or anger or fear.

As an overlay to this is "the outsider perspective", Dhiren's TV show as well as the book he has written is of the same title. Countering him is the Swamiji who talks about catching a glimpse of reality in a more intuitive, spiritual way.

"The key idea, which led directly to the writing of the play is the concept of the outsider perspective," says Chetan. "The outsider perspective is a scientific view. It is a paradigm shift in the way we see ourselves." It enables us to step outside and look at ourselves, to see why we are the way we are and why we feel the way we do. This perspective gives us the opportunity to recognise the inadequacy and imperfections of a set of instincts (that have outlived their usefulness) and, more importantly, facilitates conscious corrections and refinements to our perceptions and actions. We can thus free ourselves from the shackles of primal instincts and perceive and respond to the world more rationally and objectively.

The play in production was technically close to perfect, the different components held in perfect balance. The cast included P. C. Ramakrishna, Asim Sharma, Russel Stevenage, Kaveri Lalchand, Priya Madhusudhan, Anuradha Menon and T. T. Srinath, all seasoned and extremely competent actors who approached the complexity of the play with sophistication. The director's portrayal of Param (who did not see any reason to curb his primal instincts, because to him they were no better or less than someone else's moral instincts) was done with great finesse. He made a very stimulating counterpoint to Dhiren's central point. The play does not have a classic structure and poses a wonderful challenge to the director.

Mithran Devanesan's sets and light design were stunning. With a ton of steel and 750 square feet of platforms, he managed to understate and give the play its space. By being designed at eye- level the stage optically captured the audience and held its attention on the techno-modern environment, momentarily helping them to ignore the aging colonial surroundings of the theatre.

With blue and orange steel pipes, 16 TV sets built into the grid and new age furniture, the set was a complete studio. The TV sets were also the vehicle to carry over the best parts of the outsider perspective, through a series of video clips, which interspersed and punctuated the play. Chetan sees television as a cultural instrument. "Instead of being the custodian of what is good and worthwhile, it celebrates the prurient, the primitive and the populist."

More than anything else, the play generates discussion and reflection about things often taken for granted, about altruism and primal instincts and the possibility of sublimation. Chetan wanted his play to give rise to reflection at two levels. At one level about social correctness, in terms of individual greed, pair bonding, gender inequity, social hierarchy, ...... and, at another level, the more philosophical reflection on understanding the self from the outside and the mechanisms of the mind evolved to negotiate the world.

Chetan sees "the need to engage with the audience at a non- cognitive level. In fact the play questions the very framework with which an audience comes in to theatre. At the level of content (not at the level of form) it questions the traditional way of seeing". Chetan's play holds up the mirror to us but with a twist, refracting our view to add a new perspective, perhaps that of the outsider.

The players

ENGLISH Theatre in Chennai owes much to the Madras Players. During the 43 years since 1957 that they have been around, they have remained a most stable group with sound ethics and objectives and a clear-cut philosophy. They were, and are, an immensely talented group with a commitment to value based theatre. The 1960s and 1970s, when the Players had theatre personalities like Snehalata Reddy, Lakshmi Krishnamurthy, Ammu Mathew and Girish Karnad, were exciting years for the audiences. There was a sudden spurt in translations of Indian language scripts into English. All of them were picked up by the Madras Players for production, often for the first time in India. Every single play by Girish Karnad (with the exception of "Naga Mandala") premiered in Chennai, was presented by the Players.

They enlarged their footprint five years ago when they set up the Madras Players Theatre Club, with the idea of making theatre a self-sustaining activity. It has given them the time and the resources to pursue the more creative kind of theatre and to have closer interactions with their audience. They went a step further, declaring the Millennium Year 2000 the "Year of the Chennai Playwright". Workshops were organised that generated a number of scripts, all of which were presented to the city in workshop productions followed up with interactive discussions. And hopefully, they will continue into the new century, a respected group that refuses to fail its audience.

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