The best part about amateur productions is that you can never know what they’ll surprise you with. The people involved are often young, energetic, bustling with new ideas, unhindered as yet by naked ambition, box-office demands, disillusionment or with the jadedness that may come with fame or seniority. And when these surprises are pleasant enough you just know that temporarily at least you can shove away the anxities you may have about the state of the theatre. For that day you can feel rejuvenated; the magic of the dimming lights is once again upon you and theatre you say is alive and well.
Le Chayim Productions’ debut CONFESSIONS, which premiered at the youth festival Thespo in 2006 may not be the most competent amateur production that you may have seen but it certainly has its fine moments. An edited version of Martin McDonagh’s critically acclaimed play THE PILLOWMAN (2003), the production is able to essentially capture the dark and brutal comedy of the original. Its young actors are unfazed by the complex nature of the text (as it is with most young people) and do it reasonable justice. The performances aren’t the most nuanced ever but the talent is clearly there.
Divyang Thakkar plays Katurian, a writer who is brought into interrogation over the bizarre replication of a spate of murders that are inspired by his macabre stories. His younger brother Michal (Divyesh Vijayakar) who is presumably slow of mind also gets involved and what follows is an intriguing and a chilling psychodrama. But that’s just one level at which the text works. Time and again there are references, sometimes direct and sometimes oblique to the larger issues of what it means to be creative in a police state and of how poor literature would be if everyone only had nice stories to tell.
Scratch the surface and the play speaks of the writer’s anguish and the suppression that he has to face, be that in the form of benign censorship or under the rule of a harsher totalitarian regime. The play underlines the need for unbridled creativity, cruel as it may appear. It is these qualities that add to the dynamism of the plot in which humour is handled deftly.
Kashin Shetty who has directed the play also plays Tupolski, one of the inspector-detectives who bring in Katurian for questioning. He is accompanied by Inspector Ariel (Siddharth Kumar) who is seemingly the nastier of the two. Due credit goes to Kashin who is easily the finest actor of the lot and it’s thanks to him really that the production holds. He delivers a controlled performance and yet is able to stir up the humour in the lines just as it perhaps should be.
Kashin’s direction is simple enough; yet small but significant things like the background projection of an animated version of Little Jesus (one of Katurian’s cherished stories) adds an imaginative layer to the production. The surreal touch to the scenes in which Katurian and Michal’s parents (Abhilasha Isaac and Himanshu Sitlani) appear adds to the black humour. The psycho-suspense drama in effect becomes the shell in which Katurian lives his stories.
The production would have been more rewarding had the young actors not been careless about basic theatre fundamentals such as voice projection and clarity in speech. It was really one of the most annoying (and unforgivable too) aspects of the show. But hopefully the team is aware about this. They have a powerhouse of a script to thank for but it can’t be taken for granted.
*The writer is Editor of this site, a theatre critic and an academic keenly interested in Theatre & Performance Studies.
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