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Meaning in disorder
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If you are willing to look beyond the bombardment of sounds, then Ramu Ramanathan’s Medha and Zoombish II is a cutting comment on society as it affects children
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Photo: Bhagya Prakash K.
HAUNTING IRONY The high energy and vitality of the performance can easily lead you to believe that it’s a happy play
You read the synopsis, enter the auditorium, see some 20-odd teenagers in the cast and are doubly convinced that “Medha and Zoombish II” is a play for children. For a while, the play allows you to feel good about your assumptions; a schoo
l, noisy children, classroom, punishing principal, homework and ten thousand doubts about everything in the world. As you watch with rapt attention the high-energy performance, you catch our own T.P. Kailsam, William Blake, Charles Dickens and others whirring past your already busy mindscape. But why? Because you fooled yourself into believing that it is a children’s play, while it is hardly so. It is a play by children critiquing adults.
That’s not the end of the disclosure, there’s more. We all go with – there will be a definite storyline, the narrative is going to be linear or at most it will be cyclical, and of course there will be a climax. “Medha and Zoombish II”, at the Ranga Shankara festival, hardly as any of these logical units that will make for a cohesive, well-defined structure. Instead, it is a mishmash of episodes (picked from immediate surroundings) that are strung together, to cause more than just chaos. Well, after all, isn’t it true that lives of children in our times are a confusing bombardment of scattered, diverse images? Do they have the luxury of even a semblance of a holistic experience? Or even a logical progression? And so, what you have on stage, even with its apparent anarchy, hullabaloo and non-stop prattle is a truth that glares coldly in the face. So hard-hitting that you want to see it as “overdone theatrics”.
What is it then? Theatre? A piece of reality? Call it by any name, it breaks your notions of theatre and quite wonderfully. If self-worth is a water bubble, then you even see it evaporating.
This Out of Context production, written and directed by Ramu Ramanathan, is about Medha and Zoombish, teenagers who study in the same school. While Medha is an embodiment of a child of the present generation, Zoombish, armed with firm beliefs and a quietitude becomes an outsider. The other children of the school including Medha, look upon him with disdain, because Zoombish doesn’t quite fit into their brisk, upmarket world. Zoombish, unflinching that he is, doesn’t sway, instead draws them all into his fold. The play, I think, is remarkable for the way it makes deep comments in what seems like a casual turn of events. Zoombish stands out for the way he braves his loneliness, so true of all difficult choices.
The play, a quarrelsome musical, makes some plucky observations about all institutions and their oppressive, corrupt nature – education system, parenting, and the teaching community. In fact, there are some brilliant lines too. For instance, look at this one on education, “With pedagogic words they brainwash us and reduce us to homogeneity” and this one on parents, “Why don’t parents runaway? Why don’t parents get caught?”.
What makes it powerful is the juxtaposition of a chorus that moves with robotic gestures along with a dialogue delivery that is also robotic, stripped of emotions. While it achieves a healthy critical distance, it has an acerbic effect on the audience.
“Medha and Zoombish” ropes in underworld, beggar mafia, drug pedlars, everything that’s now part of childhood. So much so that children now “hate fairy tales”, what with life remotely connected to beauty. Television is of course a big presence in their lives – and the mushy, syrupy school romances embellished with teddy bears, hearts and red roses are enough proof.
The play offers four endings, put cleverly in the language of cinema, which makes each of these conclusions far removed from life. Everything in the play is a comment, even the high energy and vitality of the talented bunch of children. These lovely actors double up as musicians, dancers and keep you in state of constant alert.
There are no whispers, it is totally loud-mouthed. However, if you don’t see the tragedy of it all, then like television, cinema, and all institutions, it’s a case of life far removed from life. The shadow-effect in the play is very effective. It resonates T.S. Eliot’s lines in “The Hollow Men”: “Between the ideal, and the reality, falls the shadow.”
Watching the play is like walking through a hall of mirrors.
DEEPA GANESH
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Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Madurai
Mangalore
Puducherry
Tiruchirapalli
Thiruvananthapuram
Vijayawada
Visakhapatnam
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