Reality: Pity that it is not just a play…
For a theatrical presentation titled Reality Show, this original play had more than its fair share of suranganaa kathaa (fairy tales). What better way, perhaps, than to explore gritty knotty themes such as the subconscious mind, identity, and the labyrinth of human sexuality? Life, or ‘reality’, like this wrinkle in the weft of the play’s modality, if full of little ironies. And the presentation was richer for the paradox.
My one grouse would be that in a production of one hour and forty minutes, too much of the time and space available was spent on seeming non sequiturs such as kuruminiyas (beetles) and the terror, or awe and pity, it inspires in not a few of the characters. While the successive sequences featuring beetle-terror as personal neurosis and beetle-war as national conflict melded and synced quite well, the segue felt a tad contrived – coming as these scenes did in the rather heavy first twenty minutes. Maybe they served a larger purpose in the canvas of the creator’s (subconscious) mind… a sort of therapy for arachnophobics? Be that as it may, it was well employed to weave a web for the trapping of the public imagination on a few very private items and interpersonal issues.
But I’m mixing metaphors less than twenty sentences in. And many of you don’t know what the premise of the play was. So here goes with a brief synopsis:
Bit players show up expectantly for what they think is an audition, only to find that a psychotic director has set the stage for them to perform for his voyeuristic pleasure the stories of their respective lives. They each have a dark secret. So the plays within the play bring out attendant issues of ethnicity, sexual identity, trauma of the mind for lost souls in a way that engages, amuses, outrages, and unifies the diverse ensemble of performers. In the end, the audience is invited to share in the “director’s” voyeurism and sadistic pleasure. We leave the darkened auditorium wondering who they are, who we are – players in some perverse penman’s script?
We enter a darkened auditorium, with mood music threatening subtly in the background. The sets are minimalistic, but the props are utilitarian: no scenery or structures save the moveable scaffolding on castors, but many bits and pieces such as assorted cloths and sundry bits and pieces come in handy to put on the stories of the trapped characters’ tragic and tormented lives. Pity that in some of the enactments, and in a play abounding with sundry theatrical helps, the necessary props were strangely missing. For instance, in a scene with a crutch doubling as a machine gun and a prosthetic limb being gorily tossed around to conjure the bleeding horrors of internecine war, a player had to mime a water-canteen being opened. Maybe we were meant to imagine some items, but the point of the missing props escapes me for the moment. There were also leftovers from other productions by this troupe, ergonomically pressed into service.
The lighting was sharp and nuanced; but the action was fast and tight, and necessitated that all seven actors be limber, lithe, and amazingly acrobatic. The audience was often at the edge of its seats for the kinesthetic virtuosity of the players’ high-jinks as much as the raw nerves that the thematic material scraped, like a torturer’s instrument against a sensitive part of the anatomy. The screaming highs of the psyches ruthlessly laid bare by the writer/director of the play and the “writer/director” in the play were nicely counterpointed by the idiotic and id-iotic lows of comic slapstick relief. (For this relief many thanks, and many plaudits, for it sharpened the appetite for the denouement – if that… while soothing frazzled nerve-endings.)
Perhaps this was the cleverest, sharpest, edgiest exploration of life in its raw reality that I’ve seen in a long time. And the fact that it was packaged and presented with sterling production values that underplayed the fluff and majored on innovative use of movement, mood lighting, nuanced body language, creative special effects, and collective impact of sights and sounds was to its credit. The one literally jarring note that struck those in the front rows, especially, might have been that the volume in parts was set too high. Theatre in Sri Lanka is yet to learn that softness and even silence can shock and scintillate as much as screaming and stridency can.
Minor quibbles, these. What needs to be most impressed on those who missed it – so that they won’t, next run – is that original theatre (that is was in Sinhala was almost incidental, because it attracted a significant fraction of the ersatz English drama crowd) is slowly but surely coming of age – if it hasn’t already matured quite a bit from the uninspired comedic productions and unashamed cosmopolitan reproductions. Those are needed too, in any tongue for every tribe, to complete the dramaturgical panoply we bear in the name of art and entertainment. But this is reality that challenges, stimulates, and demands a response.
So Jehan Aloysius and CentreStage Productions must be commended – again – for thinking out of the box and seeing theatre through a transformational (if ostensibly personal) prism… and having the courage to act on the director’s whimsical impulses. No small measure of kudos to his small crew and superb cast, all of them from the Sinhala stage – who carried the evening through with (as I always write) “vim, vigour, vitality.” We were thrilled, shocked, shamed, and left the auditorium carrying a burden for people in our society which we didn’t come in with. And that, for me, is worth the price of admission and the invitation to taste, touch, smell the reality of lives lived by some if not all of us – in fear, pity, hope…
Theatre Review
Reality Show, written and directed by Jehan Aloysius
Lionel Wendt: November 14-16