Ripples on the brain

One of my friends has his engagement today and again a pattalam descended on Chennai. That enabled me to plan something yesterday evening for all of us (not that I needed them to decide what I wanted to do this weekend). I had already decided that I would definitely watch the play “The cut of Hamlet”. This is my first play of the Evam group and in fact my first brush with the English theatre and I was planning for this ever since I read reviews of the play in the Hindu and Express last week.

The auditorium was very good though we didn’t get a chance to check its acoustics. The actors rendered dialogues on top of their voices without microphones - a good decision since mikes will hinder the free movement of the actors - an important aspect of the play. From the reviews, there were somethings that I already knew about the play - that the actors were going to use the entire auditorium (and not the stage alone) and that the audience will be involved during the course of the play.

The play itself is split into two - “The Cut”, which was like an unconventional play before the actual one, “Hamlet”. The main actors (three of them) surface during the start of the play supposedly planning to do the Hamlet when one of them, referred to as TMK, decides to run away from the stage. Karthik Kumar (one of the reasons I wanted to watch the play was he, for he is my favourite RJ Suchi’s husband. Remember the guy in “Alaipayuthey” who ponnu-pathufies Shalini and says, “Enna achchu, churidhar potta appo neria pesineenga, ippo podavai kattina apparam peche varale. Unamaiya sollunga, naa ok ya, ok illaya“? It’s the same guy) chases him and goes out of the auditorium with him. That chase was very funny because it happened in the place where we were sitting. Even as the play began the late comers were still trickling in and as TMK was running out, he caught hold of a guy wearing a Superman t-shirt, as if using him to make good his escape. That Superman was totally caught unawares and he took sometime to realize that this was part of the play! The exit of these two people supposedly gives them the excuse to stage the first play “The Cut”.

“The Cut” was hilarious till it lasted. It was clear that all the actors were amateurs, but they gave an excellent performance. Everybody had a good screen, err… auditorium, presence and definitely charmed the audience. “The Cut” started off on a seemingly serious note, but as it proceeded, it provided for some unadulterated fun. The whole play was based on the concept that the players act in a play which is directed as a part of another play which itself is directed as part of another play and so on. So everytime some sequence happens on stage, there’s a director who emerges from the audience who points out something from the sequence. As it turns out, that director himself/herself ends up as an actor of another play, playing his part of the director who is directed by another director of play in which he (i.e the first director) acts as a director and this continues. (Well if you didn’t understand it, then I had the same feeling watching the play!). The actors end up forgetting their original identities and try to identify themselves from the script. The idea for this play seems to have been emerged from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” - “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women are mere players…”. Dialogues started flying thick and fast from all the corners of the auditorium, audience really had to turn 360 degrees to spot the actor among the audience. At the closing stages of the play, the audience was made to guess where the next actor is going to emerge from. Just as I started feeling that it was getting boring, the play ended. The ending was again very hilarious and probably the best part of the play with each actor trying to find an excuse to leave the stage. The actor I liked the most in this part of the play is the tall girl who comes in to replace the bulb in the stage. When the director suggests that she might be offered a role in the next play, the way she looks at the other girl was very funny.

The second play “Hamlet” started after a break. The two actors who fled the stage (okay, one chased the other) return and the three take up all the roles in the play switching from one to another at break-neck speeds. The comfort that the actors had, however, was that if there was an error in the costume or dialogue delivery, they could always make it look intentional. The main theme of this play was also hilarity. Somewhere during the play they also involve the audience, grabbing a girl and then a guy to play a part and then asking entire sections of the audience to deliver dialgues. This part was funny to us again because one of our friends, Kaustabh, was so disgusted with the play that he wanted to run away from the auditorium. Suddenly, Karthik Kumar came down and picked this guy and took him to the stage. This proved to be too funny for the rest of us. . The clear man-of-the-match of “Hamlet” was TKM. I liked the way he renders a long dialogue very fast only for the other guy to suggest that they skip that .

On the whole, the play made us laugh hard till the time we were inside the auditorium. But when we actually thought if it was worth the money we paid, I think we couldn’t justify it. It was funny alright, but there wasn’t anything else to feel satisfied about. My friend put it aptly when he said, “It’s okay I watched it today as it was a good time-pass, but I wouldn’t suggest this to anyone”.