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Entertainment
A well-crafted entertainer
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The hard work of director Rajiv Krishnan seems to have paid off as the audience thoroughly enjoyed ``Inspector General," writes ELIZABETH ROY.
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"Government Inspector"... an enormously funny adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's "Inspector General".
NIKOLAI GOGOL'S ``Inspector General" caused quite a stir when it was first presented in 1836. It offended many; it exhilarated others. The play was declared a masterpiece, a special brand of grotesque realism from the first great realist of the Russian theatre. The play, sometimes titled ``The Government Inspector" is a satirical allegorical phantasmagoria in the form of a woebegone provincial town whose greed, fear, pride, incomprehension and need for confession are awakened by the arrival of a non-entity, mistaken for the Government Inspector. The play perfectly fit Magic Lantern's ideological stance and the kind of theatre they do. While staying very close to Gogol's script, Rajiv Krishnan came up with an enormously funny adaptation, which was relevant to the Indian context, particularly so to Tamil Nadu.
Manikandan, a clerk in a government office in Chennai and his servant Pichai are ``visiting temples." By the time they reach Mellikuppam they are hungry and out of pocket. The Municipal Council, made up of the important people of the small town, mistake him to be the Government Inspector who might be there on duty, incognito. Mani grabs his golden goose, moves into the President's house, flirts with his wife and daughter, eats chicken curry at the district hospital and from the Judge's kitchen, while Pichai goes looking for manga pickle. He takes money from everyone in return for favours and pardons and speeds away to Bangalore in a local taxi just as the news reaches the exhausted members of the Council that the real Government Inspector has just arrived.
From start to finish ``The Government Inspector" had taken director Rajiv Krishnan a year of hard work, and it has paid off. The audience thoroughly enjoyed the production. Most people agreed that it was pretty high quality entertainment, considering that it kept their attention riveted for two whole hours. Shifting the perception of fairly ordinary, sometimes nasty, events and providing the audience with another, less serious, slightly caricatured version, achieved the comedy. Without putting anybody down, the play drew from the diversity and variety in our life to add to the comic touch. Dominant characteristics were enlarged and brought into focus and made funny. Under the veneer of laughter, the play reflected on the way society has been deprived of morality over the past several years. It was a pleasure to see a stage crowding over with as many as seventeen actors almost all of whom gave high quality performances.
While the lead roles played by experienced old timers were very well done, in a strange way, the main contribution to the success of the evening came from a host of minor characters and brief appearances. Jagan as Pichai was completely with it. The audience appreciated the fact that he was constantly pushing his role to get more out of it, to give them one more laugh. Kumaravel as MRP was stereotypical and superb. His conversation in Tamil over the cell phone was a brilliant touch and suggested the underlying presence of the real language, which was communicating. The crowds went wild over him. Pravin as the police-battered Verghese Oommen was on stage for a couple of minutes but impressed with his fine acting and the string of abuses in Malayalam. Nancy, the broom-wielding servant, played by Archana (and Gitanjali Sriram on the other days) and the others were all very good and pointed to the potential within small roles.
The Reddy twins, Lucki and Rami, (Yog Japee and Raghuram Avula) lent the most exotic touch to the production with their ever ready splattering of Telugu, perhaps more so an absolutely runaway performance by Avula. Hans Kaushik as Mani did much to the lead roll. His awakening into the impostor merits mention. P C Ramakrishna as the nasally twanged Judge was a pleasure to watch. While Sriya Chari presented rather well the over-dressed, pretty, egocentric principal of the Women's College, Shankar Sundaram impressed with his stereotypical character and body contortion, which was sustained right through the production.
Another role delightfully done was Lara Pappa by Nidhi Verghese and Aparna Gopinath. Paul Mathew (as the president of the Municipal Council), who opened the play on a low energy note, picked up as the play went along and ended in his usual full throttle mode. A very good performance as a well defined Rosy from Kaveri Lalchand somewhat suffered because of the dance-like hand gestures, which were definitely overdone and distracted.
The trick in this kind of theatre is for the actors to go beyond being good actors to actually being the character. More than half the cast performed at that level. Part of the reason was also the use of right language. By and large the speaking was entirely in English. However, superb use of accents, intonations and the right cadence achieved a sense of feeling that the characters were actually speaking different languages. Akhila Bette's costumes defied authenticity and went straight towards creating mood. They were all exaggerated and caricatures and succeeded in attracting attention. They definitely enhanced the physicality of the theatre, with its movements choreographed by Pasupathi.
The sets from Natesh comprised three flights of steps that interlocked and juxtaposed the complexity of the action on stage. It was simple and provided the possibility of a third dimension. In the absence of props, the sets facilitated a multitude of locales. The structure allowed the actors to go up and down and sideways at different levels. It was a little disappointing that it was not maximally used in choreographing the moves and in creating compositions.
The strongest support for the play came from the use of a live wedding band. It was so right. It made the play an earthy everyday experience because the band is so much a part of the happenings of rural life. It was a very well crafted play where a lot of detail was worried about. It was two hours of good fun and entertainment for the audience. Does it form mainstream English theatre in Chennai? All the people who enjoyed it and the few who objected to it will have to decide.
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