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Not quite a blossom
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The play “Water lilies” was woven around characters who feel and pay for their love of beauty in an insensitive world
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HUMOUR AND ANGST A scene from the play
“Water Lilies” directed and written by Gowri Ramnarayan had its premier in Chennai on Sunday at Sivagami Pethachi Auditorium. The ‘lilies’ have an undeniable physical reality in the play, large as life in the backdrop, in the allusions to them, which pepper the script, and in the metaphors used by the playwright. The “Water Lilies” is largely an exposé of some of the director’s experiences as a well-travelled observer and from a journalistic vantage point of which she has extensive experience.
The play, a trilogy, moves from a light-hearted musings of two nature enthusiasts in a park (“Fawn Lilies”) to a romance between two strangers at an art exhibition (“Water Lilies”) to an exposition of the darker realms of the soul in the claustrophobic confines of a Washington airport (“Black Lilies”). But once the seed of the metaphor of the lily is planted in the mind, it rapidly grows into a jungle of confusion as the audience is left grappling with oddments which do not fit together and have no sense of closure. The content and tone is too transitory to be authentic to its muse. “Water Lilies” seems to lack the plot or the mechanics it needs to elevate it to a major theatrical work and the suggestion is that the “lilies” that the characters refer to are an empty symbol denoting nothing in particular.
Added to this, another significant gamble is undertaken by the playwright: the actors, who interspersed impassioned outbursts with inconsequential meanderings, were wooden and not credible, with the exception of Dhritiman Chatterjee who shone as the worldly wise author caught in a disintegrating world of values — but it was a triumph of acting over the material. The trilogy is handled and given voice by six actors — Sunandha Ragunathan, Deesh Mariwala, Swarnamalya, V. Balakrishnan, Dhritiman Chatterjee and Pratiksha.
Gowri seems to share with her protagonists a strong sense of frustration at dealing with life’s upheavals. These characters feel and then pay for their love of beauty in an insensitive universe. Mostly what the characters seem to want is a sense of peace and tranquillity and the liberty to enjoy beauty (There is also a bleak appropriateness about the purity of the sets, which shows a lone green wooden bridge and a screen showing Monet’s lilies in transforming hues).
In “Fawn Lilies,” two strangers at a park attempt to distinguish truth from reality, and the dull family secrets the birdwatchers share are the stuff of undergraduate philosophising and creaky drama. With “Water Lilies”, an investment banker and a pretty Sri Lankan refugee who loves Monet’s lilyscapes meet and a brief flicker of romance blossoms as they exchange trite tales. In “Black Lilies”, the final part of the trilogy, the scene shifts towards an angst-ridden lamentation as the protagonists continue living in a world of eroding and sometimes depraved sensibilities against the spectre of 9/11.
In this all-too-familiar collage of personal narratives, a few moments of emotional power break through. But those glimmers of eloquence don’t begin to make up for the play’s clunky exposition and lack of a plot; a lily can be a dangerous muse if left totally to the imagination of the beholder.
A play like “Water Lilies” can leave theatre-goers either abuzz or asleep, depending on their tolerance for humdrum storytelling. In all fairness, the audience did feel the tranquil symbolism of the flowers, but at no point did their fragrance penetrate the mind.
DEVIKA NATARAJAN
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