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One hour, many emotions

A kaleidoscope of stories presented by Stagefright and Masquerade made for an interesting evening at the Alliance Francaise

A PEEK AT PEOPLE'S LIVES From (left) "God" and (right) "Poof"

Short stories can be tricky. You need to grab your audience's attention, pick up the pace and conclude in just about the same time you would normally take to set the scene in a full length play.

Short stories can also be easy. You can tell your abbreviated plot and take a bow well before audiences start squinting at their restless cell phones.

Interestingly, both the directors who staged plays at the Alliance Francaise on Tuesday night, as part of The Hindu MetroPlus Theatre Festival, showcased super-short stories. Although they were given half an hour of performance time each, they chose to cram five different stories into the one hour that they played to a comfortably full auditorium.

Not a bad decision actually. It's difficult to get bored when you're offered a bouquet of such a wide variety. And there was significant variety: though for some reason, almost all the plays had a thread of the macabre running through. But that's possibly irresistible with plays of this length since they need to amplify emotion quickly to reach that essential cliffhanger.

Suspense and humour

The first three — directed by Samanth Subramaniam for Stagefright — were very different stories, held together by a common mood, dark suspense laced with humour. In the opening play `No Crime', the sharp, seemingly languid, tobacco chewing hot shot lawyer Jim (played by Freddie Koikaran) interviews a bright young lawyer (played by Samanth Subramaniam) for a hotly contested opening in his firm. With the black and white set up, punctuated by little besides shades of grey, and a single spotlight, the scene looked like an old-fashioned detective flick, which worked for the script, centred around this interview-interrogation.

Story two was less effective. The setting was the bathroom with a single sink and Leonard (Samanth) shaving deliberately, while his parents hollered outside, asking him to open the door. A challenging play, it required Samanth to hold the audience interest with this rather static scene, while the actors playing the father and mother needed to pull off vocal acrobatics to keep the audience hooked. What resulted was inertia, however, with the parents' screeching and door thumping becoming plain annoying, and the climax far less chilling than it should have been.

Then, Freddie and Samanth — who, to their credit, managed to switch personas skilfully through the evening — lumbered on stage in play three `Poof', playing their most hilarious roles yet. Freddie came in first, in a kaftan and shower cap adorned with strawberries, as the eye-rolling, semi-hysterical, Loureen. She had just mojo-ed her abusive husband turning him into a little pile of dust, and was torn between bewilderment, horror and jubilation. ("I could be canonised. Saint Loureen. The patron saint of battered wives... they'll place pies and pot roasts at my feet, and pray to me to turn their husbands to dust.") Samanth followed as the hand-wringing, lip-pursing Florence, wearing the most hideous red dress and scarf, sticking out his hips and squealing "Chile, what's the matter with you?" Thankfully, neither resorted to the over-exaggerated histrionics most men playing women find indispensable — high falsettos, mincing walks and overdone chest heaving — and seemed comfortable in their skins, making them both easy to empathise with and laugh at. Their never faltering Harlem meets Will Smith accent, by the way, was probably the most charming feature of the play.

Krishna Kumar S., director of the Masquerade productions, chose a relatively more colourful stage set up. His first play, "God", however, was let down by the story, which was a plot so simple it could be encapsulated in a sentence. Tara Raman played the ostensibly traditional wife, just back from her dance classes, having tea with her husband as she told him about how she dreamt she had woken up beside god. That's all there was to it, really. Yet, Tara did a good job, managing to flesh out her rather sketchy character. Nevertheless, the play stumbled towards a crescendo that fell flat.

`Deep Freeze,' written by the same playwright Gautam Raja, fared much better, perhaps because it laughed at such essentially Indian traits: the affection for Readers Digest ("It's sort of like an old family friend dropping in. He's going to say exactly the same stories he said last time), the fascination for appliances from abroad, and mother's who boast about their children. ("He's a bit of a genius. Been writing poetry since he was five.) The actors were well cast, Pritham Chakravarthy as the hyperactive wife, bustling about freezing everything from potatoes to today's papers in her new deep freeze, to Krishna Kumar as the mild mannered, evidently long suffering husband. But again, the story tra-la-lad along and then ended rather unsatisfyingly.

However, on the whole, the kaleidoscope of stories and actors made for an interesting evening. After all, how often do you get a peek at so many lives, and run through so many different emotions, all in the space of just one hour?

SHONALI MUTHALALY

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