Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | Friday Review | Young World | Property Plus | Quest | Folio |

Of harmony and homogeneity

Black With ‘Equal’

August 12, 7.15 p.m., The Music Academy

Staged over a hundred times, “Black With Equal” has played to appreciative audiences and participated in prestigious festivals across India. Written and directed by Vikram Kapadia, this play takes an unsettlingly honest look at contemporary society, ultimately becoming a scathing comment on the human condition.

Kapadia says that after spending about fifteen years in theatre as an actor and director, a “thirst for local playwrights… led me to attempt my concoction in my own backyard.”

The result is this two act play, which opens with the Annual General Meeting of a Housing Society. Though the meeting starts out amicably, a series of bizarre circumstances propel it to its doom. Symbolising law, order and civility, it fall apart when it is overrun by fear, mistrust, suspicion and prejudice. The mask of civility is slowly peeled off, layer by layer, exposing a core of bigotry, an ugly mirror of the current human situation.

Kapadia says it seems “to capture the order of the day, not only in our city, but all over the world.”

Looking back, he says writing this, his first two-act play “was actually an act of faith.” He adds, “The writing had its fair share of impasses, but I kept at it mulishly. At some point I decided that it was a full-fledged script, until I picked it up to direct it. To hear the dialogue being spoken by the actors suddenly woke me up to the fact that a great deal of reworking, editing and fine-tuning still remained to be done.” He concludes that whole the director’s role is certainly important, “intervention seemed to happen almost imperceptibly, without my being aware of where the writer ended and the director began.”

The play stays true to the ideas of Masque, which he created in 1987 “primarily to do things my own way.” Masque as a group is committed to “exploration over slick solutions. A group committed to questioning itself, even if it means tripping over some currently fashionable or sacred notions of theatre. A group that prioritises process over product, raw edges over smooth finishes.”

It’s central message? “Unity does not mean uniformity. Yet we have come to a stage where we are distrustful of difference of any kind – whether of culture, caste, community, gender or language. In these communally troubled times, this play becomes particularly relevant as it reminds us of the age old truth that harmony does not mean homogeneity.”

DIRECTOR'S CUT

Everything has been said before and done before. This happens to be a voice of another.

Instead of going with a straight serious script, why did you use dark humour? Do you think it makes it more effective?

I think this is a very serious script and its simplicity is quite deceptive. The script also projects the insanity in human behaviour. Besides, we need huge doses of an anti-venom called laughter to survive the helplessness of the human condition.

After many years of working with theatre, and a variety of plays, what is different about this one?

It’s the first two act play I have written.

Does being the playwright make it easier to direct?

Well, I only need to get into a dispute with myself. The effort is the same.

I remember meeting Girish Karnad in 1994 and discussing “Tughlaq” with him in detail before directing it. I was visualising the third scene as a game of chess and wanted my actors to literally create the imagery on a black and white floor.

As a young director taking on the work of a celebrated playwright with a huge body of work, I thought it better to run such ‘liberties’ by him. To my surprise, he said he wrote that scene with that very thought in mind. I was ecstatic. But ‘serendipity’ is a very rarely used word.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail