Drift - Close to kill (IS-1)

Been drifting for a while…

Here's the general 29 day route – a lot of places only in transit
Bangalore - Delhi - Rishikesh - Shivpuri – Devpriyag - Pauri - Shivpuri – Rishikesh - Dehradun - Delhi – Mumbai – Ratnagiri – Malvan – Savanthwadi – Mapusa – Panjim – Maragao – Karwar – Ankola – Gokarna – Hubli - Bangalore

I'm pretty tired. Will let the multimedia do the talking.
I have to finish Into Stone ...


Delhi show of Creeper went well.
This was one of the profiles we used for the show. It's really old - ancient even. Quite a sight.
Don't want to get on the wrong side of this piece of equipment!
Belting Mughalai food at Karims was great.
And if I'm in Delhi, what's to stop me from hopping onto a bus at ISBT and heading for the mountains!!!


Ganga Base Camp - Alpine Star, Shivpuri. Awesome place. Highly recommend it for any enthusiastic white water rafting junkies. It got pretty cold. Played a lot of volleyball. Sat around the fire a lot. Met Jackie - the stupidest dog on the planet. He stole my shoe and hid it somewhere. Udit's brother called me a Sufi. A group of tekkies from Noida were at the camp singing and dancing the whole night. On the way back I did a bit of Kayaking. And one run on the raft. Managed a half-roll with the kayak. The river is a small universe... The current is really strong. I jumped into the Ganga from the raft, right into the rapids before the camp. I was laughing. I am an idiot.

Linked up with Udit and hopped a Commander to Pauri.
Saw this at the bus stop.
Pretty unsettling. Creeper still on my mind I guess. :-)


Lot of clouds at Pauri!!! But you get a 180 degree view of the Himalayas from here. Drank lots of coffee. Wrote a quickie children's play at Udit's computer institute. Kept troubling Seema Ma'am for a computer. Signal returned to my phone - but the LCD nearly froze.


Beyond... beyond beyond... Higher than anything...
Far above the nowhere ladder, over the sun...
Breathe breathe breathe ... Everything is full of infinite detail...


Plucked some oranges. Rained heavily.
Roads unsafe, so parked here. Won't make it to Bombay in time for Thespo.


Hit Dehradun. Wandered around the Forest Research Institute.
Um... I guess this sign means well... But I think we've lost something in translation.

And speaking of strange signage...

Hehehe...

Managed to catch this snap at FRI...

I think I might be shooting a bit better.

Evening in Dehradun. Drank Rhododendron juice at a fair.

It's heaven!

Um... Er... Went shopping???

Landed in Mumbai - from 3 degrees to 30 degrees.

Went at Into Stone with a vengeance.

Drove Q mad by sitting in front of the laptop for four straight days.

"What will you give the boatman?"

Took a private bus to Ratnagiri and then an ST bus to Malvan.

My poor back. The mighty Sindhudurg fort.

Stone stone stone...

Gokarna. The site of the aerial battle between Jatayu and Ravan.

Um... A rather short battle I suppose.

My dramatisation:

Muahahahah! - Bachaaon bachaao - Hic... Hic... I'll save you! - WhackSmashBash - Mayday! Mayday! May_ Splat. - Muahahahah! - I've been winged! Pani pani pani pani...

And so on...

The place where Jatayu was chillin before he decided to take on Shiva's number one devotee.
Bad move, old vulture man. Awesome chimney route here. Wanted to free climb it - but good sense prevailed. Must come back and do it with belay.

I asked a local what these were and he conveniently replied - "Devaru" ... SO... I'm interpreting it in my own way. And declaring that this stone contains the wing, bone and liver of Jatayu.

Man I need some sleep.

Happy new year all!

Creeper in Delhi

Starring Abhishek Majumdar and Mallika Prasad
Written and directed by Ram Ganesh Kamatham

Wednesday 5th December (7:00pm) at
LTG [Little Theatre Group] Auditorium
Copernicus Marg, near Connaught Place
New Delhi 110 001
(Metro Station: Mandi House)

"I am the sutradhar!!! I am pulling this string!!!"

"I can still hear him in my head.
The change of scene did me some good.
But ten minutes after I got back to Bangalore...

I'm back to where I was.

I'm growing too old, too quickly."

Creeper Production Notes (IFS-8)

Starring Abhishek Majumdar and Mallika Prasad

Saturday 24th November 2007 (7:30pm)
and Sunday 25th November 2007 (3:30pm and 7:30pm)
at Ranga Shankara, 8th Cross, 2nd Phase, JP Nagar, Bangalore - 78
Tickets: Rs 100/- available at the venue
- Contains explicit language
- Not suitable for persons below the age of 18
- Late entry not permitted
- Call or sms: 9845602265 for tele-bookings

And now that we have the PR out of the way, a few thoughts on the process. This production of Creeper is driven by a couple of central ideas. The most visual element, is the use of a painting by Edvard Munch to inform the rehearsal process.

What I love about the Vampire is the delicious ambiguity that energizes the image. Munch's painting has a strong emotional charge that supercedes the immediate need for biography and context, presenting us with an abstracted symbol, leaving our own imagination to do the rest.

This image also fits perfectly within another idea that I've been working with, right from the start of this process - the idea of Vikram and Betal as a single entity. With this production, the character of Vikram and Betal are reduced to a set of behaviors that alternately manifest in the narrator and the sutradhar, weaving between the two.

The Betal idea is explored as one of ravenous hunger, of a desire to feed on something-anything. Rarely is the Betal able to consume actual food, instead devouring memories, emotion, images – launching itself into repetitive activities that loop endlessly. The Vikram idea is viewed as being under the compulsion to physically feed, but never to find solace in the consumption of actual food. The Vikram is under siege by the Betal, having to constantly acknowledge it, often as a person suffering some kind of mental illness.

Of course, the behaviors keep dancing around interchangeably in the two acts – almost as if the two story-tellers in the play are the battleground on which Vikram and Betal have chosen to slug it out. The two characters inhabit a mindscape that is in constant flux, swinging into extreme tangential behavior and then looping into repetitive cyclic thought.

I also hope that this time the second half of the play will register better. Once the play itself swings into repetitive cycles – the meaning as such, begins to transmit itself through juxtaposition. You no longer have the comfort of saying - where is this story going? – but might have to ask – what is going on right now? The comfort of a linear tracking narrative is supplanted with the edgy spinning narrative and you are suddenly thrown into a Munch painting where questions like - who is this character? – lead to dead ends, and again the question - what is going on right now? – opens up a world of meaning…

And I think this is great question to ask not just at an individual level – but at the level of a city. What is going on right now, in a city that suffers a severe identity crisis, that is in such flux that its character might be described only in relation to another thing – a city in dialogue.

I do hope to see you at the show this weekend. And for those of you in Delhi, we travel there on the 5th of December for the Independent Fellowship final presentations. I'm off now, to break a leg, or both if possible.

A happy ending (IFS - 7)

Well sometimes you spend hours and hours looking for something and it is right under your nose. After driving myself up the wall trying to find a point of entry into the playtext, scribbling endlessly on scraps of paper and staring vacantly at the monitor – I realized that this was pretty much what I needed by way of a point of entry.

With all the inward looking on this text – I thought it only natural to write the play as a meta-narrative – with two writers engaged in the process of writing.

The text scrambled into existence fairly quickly and is being speedily eased into performance. I don't want to say too much at this point – since I'm in rehearsal and am discovering the text anew. Also, I really think a play should speak for itself!

What I will say is that I've managed a satisfying positioning of the Vikram and Betal idea that is immediate and relevant. I view these two characters as a single parasitic entity – one cannot exist without the other. This formlessness manifests dramatically as an inability to say for certain who is who, within the course of the play. Additionally the duo find themselves rooted in contemporary Bangalore – a city reeling under a period of rapid growth and development - a 'cosmopolitan city' that is clearly split down the middle – with a cultural rift that is steadily widening.

I've used a very simple linguistic approach to the play – that of counterpoint and contrast – positioning differing 'linguistic genres' to create tension and dramatic movement. The language of nostalgia slams into the lingo of online pornography – the description of an exorcism ritual, slams into the voice of the cyber stalker – orkut meets Amar Chitra Katha – a cold rational voice is set off against the obsessive-compulsive online addict.

I think what really crystallized this play for me was an incident on October 2nd. I was on my way to rehearsal and was caught up in traffic. I was on my Kinetic and realized the jam was caused by a fight that had broken out on Castle Street, diagonally opposite Brigade Towers and Globe Stores. A couple of guys were slugging it out – and the visual was immediately recognizable – a local South gang versus two Northy guys on two-wheelers. It was a pretty dumb fight – punches, scuffles, some filmi kicks and a helmet being swung into someones head. A cop was standing right opposite, very deliberately turning his back and suddenly very diligently directing traffic. And I really wasn't amused by this circus – with Kannada and Hindi expletives being flung at each other. And I took the typical apathetic middle class route – got past the jam and got the hell out of there and on my way.

I'm not an expert. I'm not one to pass quick judgment, but I think this incident pretty accurately describes what Bangalore is going through right now. And I think the text responds to this situation dialogically – placing a nostalgic 80s Bangalore voice against a rabid 21st century Bangalore voice.

I also hope that the play explores the futility of both positions – of retrogressive xenophobia and the other of glowing 'development propaganda'. The futility of saying – "Who are all these people screwing up my city?" – and "Welcome to Bangalore the world class global hub."

There's loads more – a mixture of two distinct dramaturgical styles that takes the technique of counterpoint up to the level of a formal experiment, the use of metaphor and symbolism – but I'll leave all this for the actual play to do, for poetry is that which escapes the paraphrase.

I do invite all of you in Bangalore to come see the show.

It's alive!!! - Creeper - a new play

Well guess what!
It's here - raw, corrosive and ready to bite - I am happy to announce:

Creeper

written and directed by Ram Ganesh Kamatham
Saturday 13th October 2007 (7:30pm) and
Sunday 14th October 2007 (3:30pm and 7:30pm)
at Ranga Shankara, 8th Cross, 2nd Phase, JP Nagar, Bangalore - 78
Tickets: Rs 100/- available at the venue
Contains explicit language - Not suitable for persons below the age of 18 - Late entry not permitted

Synopsis
This is a story about two people in this city.
She is writing an essay and trying to understand an ancient demon.
He is online all the time, exploring dark corners of the Internet.
She is the expert narrator, he is a mischievous sutradhar. These two story-tellers have amazing stories to share. Problem is they don't agree on how to tell the story!

Creeper is a modern re-imagination of the tale of Vikram and Betal. The play slams this ancient cycle of folk-tales into a contemporary urban setting – creating a shadowy world that is immediately recognizable, yet bizarre and entertaining.

Darkly funny yet poignant, the play freewheels between the old and the new – creating a landscape that happily contains – pornography, literary theory, orkut, Chandamaama comics, exorcism, blogging, a B-grade television serial, Bram Stoker, Silk Smitha, foul language, Kurt Cobain, a big tree with a Barbie doll nailed onto it and a magical box with something inside.

Currently in its experimental avatar, Creeper will open in a bare bones production in less than two weeks. Do come and see it... And please don't bring the kids!

Creeper - a new play

Creeper

written and directed by Ram Ganesh Kamatham
Saturday 13th October 2007 (7:30pm) and
Sunday 14th October 2007 (3:30pm and 7:30pm)
at Ranga Shankara, 8th Cross, 2nd Phase, JP Nagar, Bangalore - 78
Tickets: Rs 100/- available at the venue

Contains explicit language - Not suitable for persons below the age of 18 - Late entry not permitted

Call or sms: 9845602265 for tele-bookings

Stone, sights and sphincter (IFS – 6)

'Ars Poetica'
The goose that laid the golden egg
Died looking up its crotch
To find out how its sphincter worked.
Would you lay well? Don’t watch.
X.J. Kennedy

With this theme in mind for the month, I offer up a fix of some random photographs, and a few extracts from Into Stone.

I suspect that the Vikram and Betal text is in dire danger of being stillborn. I think my sphincter probing might have hit a critical internal organ. I'm still tinkering with it, but might switch mediums to fully realize the scope of the idea. Decision pending...

And now onto the tour...

A view of Edinburgh castle from inside a graveyard. There's stone everywhere and this stone is in possession of some really amazing 'memories'. One of the things I'll have to do is recreate this characteristic 'atmosphere'. There were dozens of memorials and each of them had a story to tell. I liked the spooky idea of the stone doing two very different things in the same picture – one structure is built to keep everyone out, the other is created to keep something inside.

A doorway of a castle in Nottingham. A mad mixture of stone is used here. You can even see the colour changes and how the door is constantly being reinforced with different kinds of stone at different points in time.
Metaphor: the stone structure as an artifact of 'cultural memory' is composed of different and conflicting accounts of the actions it has witnessed – the space is a site of continual historical dialogue.

A closer look at the patterns shows the differing 'contours' of the stone. When writing the scenes set in different time periods, I was tinkering with the idea of the 'contours of speech patterns'. Modern speech being jagged and cutting, the older scenes use sinuous or extended patterns. You might get a sense of this in the extracts.

Extracts from Into Stone

The present
Uttara: So what about you. Married?
Young man: Nah! Still free. Single. (pause) Mildly eligible.
Uttara: Mildly?
Young man: I have my dark secrets.
Uttara: Tempting.
Young man: All coming together. This place, meeting you.

Mythological Past
Old man: I saw him in the stone.
Satya: You saw him?
Old man: I make no claims. I just… I saw a sense of him… a thing… I don't know how to explain. Sight… For a moment.
Satya: You felt his form.
Old man: Yes. Yes that's it.
Satya: And you saw it dormant within the stone, waiting to be coaxed out.
Old man: Yes.
Satya: (pause) You never saw him then.
Old man: I didn’t?
Satya: How can you see the un-manifest? (pause) You saw what you did because you stopped seeing yourself as separate from the universe. You stop seeing the self, you see the infinite.
Old man: You have been chewing too much betel nut!

Historical Past
Maraj: A holy man up in the mountains Missus – he teach me this game.
They used to play it with the bones o' the dead.
This the hand o' fate. And this the souls o' the people.
Is all up and down – one life thrown in the air, or dropped. It's religious.
Young lady: Oh. Should I be playing it then?
Maraj: Sure Missus – I just made up the whole thing.

This is a stone prison(literally!). A very strange kind of limestone is used here and it's as if the rock has melted, giving it a droopy and gloomy kind of feeling. It as if the rock is old and tired and melting away – very different from resilient red laterite.

This is a completely bizarre object! It's a piece torn from a Luftwaffe jacket, purportedly from a downed WW2 Pilot. I'm not kidding or making this up! Mentioned the Iron Cross in an earlier post – definitely something to write about at some point. Spooky feeling, holding this thing...

This is a painting by Piotr Mleczko on display at the Polish Cultural Centre, Hammersmith. I totally tripped out on it – because it does visually what I'm trying to do dramatically. It mixes time frames and iconography, cohesively. I love the idea of a self split across time – the Christ-like head carrying a spear (of destiny?) - the anachronistic construct of the soldier figure. You need to be a bit 'stoned' to do this.

And talk about ostranie!
Strangely, the rick has Maharashtra license plates. Hehe...

The 'familiar' when set in a new context becomes 'foregrounded' - and as a consequence strange and unnatural, allowing us to re-experience the ordinary.

I spent about ten minutes laughing at this! Surreal!

That's it for now.

I stop my rhetoric and get down to actually writing!

The Speech a.k.a. Huh? Wha? DUH!!!

I drank too much coffee one night.

So then I said to myself – what is the dialogic relationship between language as carrier of meaning and memory as a reconstruction of perceived meaning?

Then I said to myself – Get a life.
It's Saturday night and you're online, reading about post-modernism.
Your computer is too slow.
Your brain is too wobbly.
You need to free up some hard disk space.
You need to buy a few more RAM chips.
Haha, what a stupid pun.
Ok, for a start – free up some disk space.

Then I went rummaging among file structures long forgotten, folders long neglected…

I found 1.9GB of forgotten video.

Then I said to myself – Here is some 'found' material. It is 'found' in the sense that it has been lying forgotten for a few years. It is time to allow the 'other' to operate…

I said – Arranging this material is a process of re-visiting a set of events that occurred. No one can say for certain what really happened, least of all 'the eye' staggering around via the camera. So the 'edit' of the piece is about memory and the impossibility of capturing it objectively – the frame, the 'eye' - preclude any attempt at clinical documentation.

But what does it all mean? To ask – but what does this all mean, is to miss the point entirely.

Ha! Convenient.

It's not a documentary, it's not rehearsed. It's a docudrama of some perverse variety.

A polyvocal clash…

You are full of crap – I said.

I say – I have had too much coffee.

Then I said – People always object to all the foul language in my plays.

I say – I often use foul language as a means of conveying psychological violence. Yes, it's a self- defeating paradox. My characters curse to draw attention to the constructed psyche that resorts to cursing. I foreground swearing as a linguistic genre and rob it of the ability to hurt, hoping to draw attention to my characters – who are often hurting and hurting bad – the reasons for this hurt, constitute the 'meaning' of the piece.

Then I said – All right. That's a lot of rubbish. How can you possibly use language to carry 'meaning' if you're busy robbing it of meaning? What kind of writer collapses language? You might as well drill a hole in a boat and try to row it at the same time.

I said – Uhhh… Well… Ok. Let me just pause that paradox loop for a moment.
So if we're in cacophony, in polyvocal mayhem... does an attempt at structured communication polarize the communication? Or does it all sink into Ionesco like yak-yak-yak-blah-blah – much like the Orator who appears at the end of The Chairs?

In linguistic mayhem, how can 'meaning' operate?

So then I sat and edited this short.
And I deny all responsibility for it.
And I remain intrigued by the argument.
And it's brilliantly stupid stuff... Especially without the preamble!

And I have had way way to much coffee…



NSFW - Contains coarse language. Requires audio. Video quality is rubbish night shot.
ROTFL - Too funny man... Hehehehehe...
As a Nobel Laureate once wrote : "quaquaquaqua with a white beard quaqua outside of the time of the extent that from high of its divine apathia its divine athambia its divine aphasia"

Rehearsal - the Nonologue (IFS – 5)

I've just discovered that discussing work in progress is a very sensitive issue.

So many things remain in constant flux in the making of a text, that any 'left-brained' activity that tries to rationalize this process too much, can sabotage any hope of a meaningful creative journey. A text is vulnerable in its 'draft state' and is still in the process of being born – so I'm toeing the line here and reporting on some of my work.

Also I've just spent a huge twelve hour burst hammering away at Into Stone and thought I'd call a time-out and report progress.

I spent most of my four days of rehearsal at the residency engaging with the second act of my play – and specifically the collision of the three stories – in what is a potentially a scene of absolute theatrical mayhem.

For this to make any sense I'll just share some facts about the play…

The play takes place at night, and moves between three timelines:
- present - 2007
- mythological past – somewhere in Treta Yuga
- historical past – 1857

The action occurs at a stone fort by the sea, which is
- a beach resort in 2007
- a shrine in the Treta Yuga
- a colonial bastion in 1857

In ACT 2 the space is a prison that exists in all three timelines.

This is a summary of the essential structure of the piece – with regards to time and space.

The reason I've chosen these three specific timelines, comes from the investigation of the space itself (Fort Aguada) and is best summed up in a sentence that I discovered in conversation with my director Raz.

The investigation of a space must address the necessary confluence of its present, mythological and historical contexts.

Why? The space is as I mentioned earlier, polymorphic – so to explore all the possibilities and contradictions that it has to offer – I felt the narrative needed to represent the entire array of activities that might have taken place. The scale of the play needed to be able to devour the space it was investigating.

The play then exists in triple layer – three stories within the same physical space.
At this point everyone had a headache…

Why these contortions? Each timeline represents a 'voice' - a 'discourse' if you like - and I'm fascinated by the possibility of allowing these voices to mingle and collide – as it happened in real life for me.

On questioning the space - one minute you're being hit with a mythological explanation (this was once the site of a temple where Ramachandra stayed during his exile), next minute it’s the ground reality (it's just a touristy beach resort) – then it's legacy (yeah, but it was once a colonial military structure). This polyvocal clash of worlds is what has been keeping me engaged.

SO – if the place is constant, but mutates over time, what does this do to character?

In this play as space mutates over time so does character. All credit to my actors in rehearsal (Vincent, Abhin and Farzana) because after a day of grappling with this idea – it made a fair bit of sense.

Each actor plays three roles. A character in this plays consists of a primary self – one who owns that particular story and two secondary selves – one for each other story. In one secondary self, the attributes of the primary character are distorted by power – a negative version of the self. The other secondary self – is a weak and ineffectual version of the attributes of the primary character – a minor self.

Why? My notion of character in this play emphasises the importance of 'now' – the present. Going back and forth in time can easily diffuse the immediacy of the concerns. You might get the cyclic indolence that suggests the sentiment – "Aw the same stuff happens again and again, why bother!"

Cycles exist – but the human element remains as alive for every iteration of the cycle.
So we get the characters :

Uttara from the present
who is
- young lady in 1857
- Priestess in the Treta Yuga

Satya from the mythological past
who is
- young man in 2007
- Dom in 1857

Maraj from the historical past
who is
- old man in the Treta Yuga
- SK in 2007

So the play involves three stories and nine parts to be played by three actors.
This was when everyone had their second headache. (There was no third - you go numb now.)

Also, in the second half of the play – the stage space is a prison. This prison exists in all times. If I were sitting in this cell and I were to collapse time – could I see everyone who was ever in that cell? What if I was once there, in another timeline?

To take this hallucinatory concept onto stage, in the second half of the play the stories collide – characters begin to wobble, mutating between selves and the plot jumps across timelines.

Why? Juxtaposition.

If each self is a voice – then a question posed by one voice, is answered by another version of the self. If a self is threatened it retreats into its minor self, or attacks by turning into its powerful version. The prison - becomes a howling scream of nine voices – a roar of voices across time and space.

And we've christened it, the nonologue!

We spent the first two days of rehearsal getting our heads around the play. I wrote a bit of the lead up to the nonologue over a weekend and we spent the next two days of rehearsal putting that extract on its feet.

I was hoping to get through all the complexities of the piece through the rehearsal and this did happen. The actors physicalised the action and I needed much less brain-bandwidth to orchestrate dramatic movement. Now I'm working on the second draft and taking a shot at the crescendo of the play – the orchestration of nine voices – the nonologue.

Hopefully now that I've got all the homework done – it's just a matter of emotionally experiencing each moment and fleshing out each instant of the play. No easy task – but hell – looks a lot easier now.

International Residency 2007

So here's a brief account of my experience at the 2007 International Residency for Emerging Playwrights at the Royal Court...

Week 1
I arrived in London and met the whole team at the Royal Court. There were eleven writers from eleven different countries – a quick glance at all of them
Olivier Choinière (33), Montréal, Canada
Katerina Rudčenková (31), Prague, Czech Republic
Ram Ganesh Kamatham (me - 26), Bangalore, India
Elie Kazam (37), Baabda, Lebanon
Noé Morales Muñoz (29), Mexico City, Mexico
Paul Ugbede (27), Jos, Nigeria
Maria Manolescu (26), Bucharest, Romania
Jean Tay (32), Singapore
Vanessa Montfort (31), Madrid, Spain
Lorenz Langenegger (27), Zurich, Switzerland
Wael Qadour (25), Damascus, Syria

Highlights of the first week included a meeting with playwright David Hare – who spoke from the heart about his experiences on writing about the conflict in Palestine and how impossibly difficult it is being a playwright (its true!).

We also had an incredible session with playwright Martin Crimp, who walked us though a few illuminating exercises about his obsession with language – we focused on two extracts from Carol Churchill and Harold Pinter – both ferociously political writers. What fascinated me is the extent to which both writers have experimented with language and structure to serves ideological ends. This also explained a lot about Crimp's own dramaturgy. Honestly, Crimp is the Merlin of UK dramaturgy. He's a wizard, with his long white hair but more importantly with his sophisticated writing style.

We also saw a couple of productions – a previously unseen play of Harold Pinter called The Hothouse at the National, and Tony Kushner's behemoth-opus Angels in America – Part 1 at the Lyric Hammersmith. And a quirky production called Food by Joel Horwood at the Battersea Arts Centre, about the topsy-turvy trajectory of a celebrity chef in his quest for perfection. The week ended with a night out at Shunt, thanks to its Artistic Director David Rosenberg which was an awesome night club underneath London Bridge. It was a true case of underground counter-culture, with long musty corridors and dark corners under archways!

Week 2
There were three big highlights in the second week.

The first was the meeting with Harold Pinter. (So there you go, I've met a Nobel Prize winner – I can die happy now!) The session was thought provoking for many reasons.
Pinter urged us to speak out and directly challenge oppressive power structures in our respective countries. He also offered his view on the UK involvement in the invasion of Iraq. It prompted me to question the relative importance of individual opinion in different cultures. (To be stark in Bangalore no one really gives a shit what you say, unless you say the wrong things.) I offered the instance of Ratan Thiyam as someone who creates extremely political theatre but in a symbolic and non-confrontational way. I'm no expert on Thiyam, but what he has managed to achieve in Manipur is remarkable. Pinter acknowledged the validity of that approach, but urged 'directness'. This is still something I haven't figured out, but will probably engage with in greater detail, in the play I'm working on.

The second was a chance encounter with a Polish radio operator from World War 2. As part of an exercise called London worlds – international writers paired up with UK based writers and explored a corner of London that offered a self contained world. This was remarkably similar to the process that I used to release the play Into Stone – with my trip to Fort Aguada. The basic idea is to saturate yourself in a physical space and respond dramatically to the stimuli that you receive from the space.

Well Louie – the Polish radio operator we bumped into had more than a story to offer – he actually pulled out photographs of his old army unit and I recognized the familiar outlines of a number of the planes in the photos– including Spitfires and Flying Fortresses. Then he pulled out two objects that literally blew out my skull - a German Iron cross and a torn piece of a Luftwaffe flying jacket. – both carrying the Nazi swastika. There's definitely a play in here somewhere, when I get around to developing this idea.



The third was a trip to the Tate Modern Art Gallery with my director for the residency, the most excellent Raz Shaw. We managed to see the Salvador Dali exhibition and one painting in particular – the Invisible Man hit me over the head with an idea for my play.

Dali paints a surreal landscape with what appears to be a disembodied man floating in it. But what is most striking is how parts of the man are actually merged into the landscape, what appears to be a waterfall, is actually the fingers of the man's hand.

It occurred to me that elements of character can actually be embedded within the external landscape of the piece – in a sense the subject occurs as a result of the mixed perception of the fore-grounded body part and the backdrop which negatively defines additional features. That's a lot of bullshit for – everything's mixed up, but you can separate individual elements on a closer look. End result – surreal and scary!

We also saw Rafta Rafta at the National – where Harish Patel was going on about 'tatti' – and about ten people in the audience were falling off their chairs. Also ran away from Othello at the Globe, which is the advantage of being a groundling.

And everyone went on a day trip to Brighton where the beach was full of pebbles and there was an awesome ride called the Booster on the pier which shoots you up a hundred feet in the air and spins you about while doing so. A memorable moment occurred when suspended upside down a hundred feet up in the air, the sea and pier became the sky and the sky became the ground – quite a Dali moment.

Week 3
This week was when fatigue was really beginning to hit. Highlights included a meeting with Tom Stoppard who spoke a bit about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, and how great work is often created in the complete absence of the knowledge of dramatic technique. We also had a meeting with Simon Stephens who did a neat workshop on dramatic action, and whom I prodded a bit about his play Motortown. I quite like the play which is really hardcore and revolves around a soldier who has just returned from serving in Basra. In fact I quite like Simon Stephens as a writer and as a writer-mentor and will be keen on seeing where he goes from here. I also wandered around St. Katherine's Docks with my writer's writer Meredith Oakes and had baked scampi for lunch.

We then dived into rehearsal which I will deal with in more detail in another post.

Week 4
The last week was the culmination of all the work done so far. We all presented ten minute extracts from the work we had been doing in rehearsal. It was an awesome presentation with 10 minutes from eleven different worlds presented at the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs. Three hundred people showed up to see it! This was a bit weird because I presented a section of the play which was really the toughest part well into the second half, which was not in the least bit audience friendly.
We were working on moving between the three stories and finding ways to make the collision of stories coherent – which we did, (at least it got clearer in my head). This extract however is coherent only with knowledge of the play itself. A lot of people who saw the extract went – huh, too complicated to follow.
This annoyed me a bit because the extract was really about the breakthrough we made in rehearsal and not really a neat cut and dried ten minute trailer for the play. Of course it was complicated, why do you think I needed to workshop it!
But anyway all I can say to anyone who was befuddled – wait till you see the play at full throttle, it will all make sense (or if I goof off will continue to be nonsense permanently!)

We were all pretty sentimental by the end of the whole thing and I really miss the whole gang of writers. Apparently we were quite a politically aware lot and many of us were writing either covert or overtly, about specific political issues. I do wonder where we will all be in a few years time!

Edinburgh
That's all for the International Residency. My next stop was the Edinburgh Festival where I had a chance meeting with David Greig the Scottish genius playwright. He's really quite amazing and his plays are really in a different league.
I managed to see a weird mix of things. I saw a brilliant play called Long Time Dead by Rona Munroe at the Traverse, which was remarkably similar to my own play Crab!
It was a controlled and beautiful character study that made me wish I was a better writer on Crab!
I also managed to see Will Adamsdale: The Human Computer – a daft interactive stand-up piece that was really funny. I ate some haggis which was fun in a masochistic way.
Also saw a guy on a ten foot unicycle juggling fire, a man dressed like a tree levitating a crystal ball, a bunch of American Indians in full costume playing the Braveheart theme, and many many drunk Scotsmen.
What better way to end this most intellectual sojourn than a trip to the Circus of Horrors where I saw some pretty crazy stuff that's not discussed in polite company.

I snuck in a quick trip to Nottingham to do some climbing – but the weather was poor and I ended up doing indoor climbing – where I discovered I was fat and incompetent as a climber after a month of English Breakfast and non stop writing. The fact that I am a lousy climber is not a new discovery, but it sure as hell doesn't stop me from loving it!
Now onto redrafting – Into Stone, due in three months!

I landed near Hyde Park (IFS – 5 ???)

Here's where things start getting interesting.
Here's when there's nothing but smooth rock face soaring upwards, with the occasional crimp, gut-wrenchingly out of reach.
Here's when there's no more scree or moraine… just a sheer wall of ice.
Here's when your lungs give out, your knees start to buckle and your brain starts locking into repetitive half-thoughts, spiraling out of focus.

And so on…
(I think I haven't gone climbing in a while and it's showing!)

In a few days I begin battle testing the latest play at the Royal Court's International Residency for Emerging Playwrights. I will be working with collaborators to flesh out the text and move the text onwards from the first draft.

No details yet. But will do a weekly update kind of thing to track progress. More in a bit...

I flew off on one of those tangents (IFS – 4)

As is often the case with creative ventures you start out searching for one thing and end up finding something quite different! My Vikram and Betal quest is still in progress, but is likely to peak into a presentable draft only in September.

However this month I do have fascinating stuff to share on my other play, which recently popped into existence, so this month's post will be a sidestep into another play-world.

As I mentioned last month I was exploring multiple stories within a single location across time. The trigger for this was the discovery of a really interesting space, Fort Aguada in Goa. The most fascinating thing about the space was that it seemed almost polymorphic. In fact even without considering history, the space in present times shape-shifts quite alarmingly.

I visited the tourist side of it, the area near the lighthouse, which predictably was hot, derelict and full of tourists. It was pretty depressing, the kind of sadness you feel when you see stone ruins. (I got the same feeling when I was at Elephanta caves. There's something profoundly gloomy about seeing broken statues, litter and metal railings steering tourist traffic appropriately away from ten meter drops and uncovered wells.)

The other side of the fort was occupied by a five star beach resort. Strictly off limits for the budget backpacker. The stone here was neatly reworked and polished to create a nice colonial feel and was inset with some pretty nifty electrical lights. Typical five star lawns, with five star daddies and mummies and kids all on holiday. This part of the fort sat right on Sinquerim beach and by night is dazzling, visible all the way up to Baga. It's also an awesome walk in the evenings. There's this ship anchored near the bastion for some reason, and it gives the place a really magical feel.

The side away from the lighthouse, is a prison. I tried heading there, but there were guards every twenty meters, giving me dirty looks. So I decided against going all the way to the gate and called it a day and made a beeline to Brittos and a seafood platter.

So there it is, in a day, I see three very different avatars of the same space. A historical monument built in the sixteenth century, part magical retreat, part shanty tourist attraction, part prison! And then I got thinking how this would translate dramatically.

I worked with three stories.

One set in the present, one in a fictionalized historical past and the other in a fictionalized mythological past. The idea behind this was that the single space conflated multiple discourses, and that putting each of these voices into a dramatic-situation would create the necessary 'conflict.' In a sense, the dramatic movement consists of the voices of mythology, history and the present, intermingling, clashing and eventually resolving within the space. Inextricably tangled within the space are the protagonists of the three stories, who are confronted with tough choices.

I'll say no more about the play itself, but will post it to the group by the 12th of July, and hope it will do the talking for me. I do welcome constructive feedback!

What I will say about the play, is that one of the agendas was to deliberately mix the present context, history and mythology. As a result, metaphors are set up within the dramatic structure of the play, and do not merely sit prettily in dialogue. I've seen too many 'well intentioned' plays purporting to explore some social malaise that proceed to bomb the audience with every piece of information about the problem being explored. I've read Pinter's Mountain Language and One for the Road and I suppose in retrospect, I'm toying with much the same technique, although I'm a bit allergic to agitprop. This approach to theme is far more effective and is provocative and exciting.

Letting the theme permeate the form of the play is a favored device of mine as it opens up dramatic exploration of ideas, like no other medium can. You can debate all day about totalitarian states, but share a moment with a character who is facing the full wrath of such a situation and an immediate emotional connect occurs.

This is my theatre – edgy, unsettling, dangerous...

Some more pics from the trip...

Three people sitting on the bastion - inspiration for the 3 characters. And the anchored ship.

A view of the prison from near the lighthouse.

The bastion, the stone...

Tangents eventually make a circle (IFS - 3)

I've been on an eclectic reading/mad travelling spree and instead of delving into the V&B text this month, just thought I'd share some tangential insights I've discovered of late. This is a bit of a travelogue-esque post.

I've been reading some translated Sanskrit plays of Bhasa, specifically the Pratimaanataka aka The Statue Play. A dull sense of familiarity began to creep up on me as I read the play and to my horror I discovered that I had actually studied it in my first year of college, although in Kannada. (Horror, because it seems I was not asleep in the last bench, as I imagined I would be, and actually remember some important bits.)

This is relevant with regard to my earlier post, where I mentioned the punning of character names in the openings of Sanskrit drama. (The term used in the book is paronomasia, which on further investigation is a synonym for pun – so much for that!) Pratimaanataka begins with an oblation that by paronomasia introduces many of the names of the characters as well as the name of the play itself. This convention is diabolically difficult to replicate in English and I've been wondering how it could manifest in modern writing.

The other discovery (continuing on my exploration of cyclic structures) is the convention of framing the play as an interrupted ritual. The prologue of most of these plays invariably has the stage manager welcoming the audience, only to be interrupted by some commotion from backstage – either an actor bringing in news of some import, a commotion and so on. This convention kick-starts the play into a mode where the audience is privy to the covenant of willing suspension of disbelief for the performance to unfold.

What is a bit frustrating in these translations is an annoying sensibility that seems to impose a five act structure onto all plays. I'm finding that the content has been slammed into a formal structure, where clearly there is another system of thought implicitly present. This is something I'll be encountering a lot, I predict, and I will often be guilty of the same myself. This is also something that will necessarily inform how a retelling of the V&B tale can be validated in a modern context, as regards to content as well as form – how to walk that tight-rope between transposition and re-imagination.

Moving on… I visited the Chottanikara temple near Ernakulam. It was truly an awesome experience. I'm viewing it as a playwright and also at some level as a student of psychology – so I'm not really going to go into the formal religious side of it.

Suffice it to say, it is an immersive collective experience that strongly utilizes spectacle and ritual to effect rudimentary behavioural changes, some pronounced, some subtle. It is very difficult to interpret the effectiveness of this 'treatment' when the validity of the whole system is problematic. It cannot be viewed as a truly scientific system, but to disregard it outright in complete blindness to its strong socio-cultural roots does it a great disservice.

My rational self was continuously seeking to impose limiting frames around the phenomenon I witnessed – catatonic/paranoid schizophrenia, clinical depression being only some of the terms that sprang to mind.

Additionally I was able to see some physical manifestations of the so called 'possessed.' To be frank it felt like being in a mosh-pit full of metal heads except it wasn't an angst-ridden teen band playing but a bunch of Mallu priests working the crowd with drums and conches and the head-banging was being done by a set of wild looking Mallu women in saris. Disregarding the obvious political incorrectness of that insight, I think I am trying to emphasise the overwhelmingly cathartic fervour that was being generated by the ritual.

For me the real terror of the space manifested in the movements of a little boy who seemed to be suffering some kind of motor impairment, perhaps due to a mental illness – especially in his inability to use his fingers properly. He seemed to be unaware of his fingers and toes and was crawling around on his wrists and knees, with his toes pointed unnaturally. And of course the clincher is the tree of nine-inch nails and dolls, which knocks even the most hardened cynic into a state of extreme unease!

My fear is that engaging with this material can so easily degenerate into a freak show of superstition, or even worse a cultural parade of indigenous mumbo-jumbo. It's so easy to take details of this experience and weave a B-Grade tale of dayyalau-bhootalu (er… that's a Telugu colloquialism I can best translate as spooks 'n ghosts) but that's just superficial and small minded. Working this system for spectacle or shock value is cultural prostitution of the worst kind.

What I do find compelling is engaging with an ancient socio-religious knowledge system that anticipates cathartic psychiatric treatment and continues to exist today!

One funny thing about the place though is how they keep setting off fire-crackers unexpectedly. The sudden loud noise really startles you! I would think this is in keeping with the shock-therapy trend established by the space.

The deity herself is fascinating – acknowledged as changing forms depending on the time of day and worshipped as three different manifestations. The theertham is blood red and was flung around quite a bit. (I'm tempted to translate theertham as holy water, but would then be guilty of the same literary dilution that I've been cursing in the translations I've been reading.)

Sadly no photos are allowed inside the temple premises. But I did mange to take a hurried snap on the way out. (My photographic skills are just below zero as is evident.) I can add to the mood of this photo by telling you that my two main thoughts were extreme joy on seeing the exit to the temple and also extreme doubts as to whether I was still in the twenty-first century after all that I had seen.

Heading further south to Varkala however brought me back to the twenty-first century with a jolt. The part of the beach where I was loitering about was full of foreign tourists and I felt like I had walked out of medieval India into modern Frankfurt. It was tough to find a local in the area! Anyway, no findings here except for excellent tandoori marlin and this surreal sign.

Let me enhance the mood of this photo by telling you that I now felt that I had walked out of medieval India into modern Frankfurt and then into some alternate universe where everyone is a little mad. I figured it was time to leave Kerala. :-)

I've also ended up re-reading Yuganta and continue to admire Irawati Karve's slicing insight into the Mahabharata. Her realist, biting and often cynical stance on the characters of this epic is something I'm truly enamoured by. What I admire is her ability to take the given details of a mythological scenario and come up with an extremely believable spin, that cuts through the ornamental elements of the tale and instead lays bare the character motivations that drive the scene – rendering the scene an abstraction of an essential human problem and as a result – relevant!

Point to remember – cut through the jazz of the mythology and find the human problems embedded in the story.

Another stunningly amateur photo of a bastion…

Here I became obsessed with the red laterite stone used at Fort Aguada. And I'm digging around to find out more about it. I wasn't sure what the information was for though, but the texture of the stone is incredible. I wonder if it would be possible to climb a face made out of this kind of rock.

However I think this stone thread will go into a different play. The basic premise of this other play I'm working on is that a single space can conflate multiple discourses – basically I'm exploring multiple stories within a single location across time.

Been a bit of an iffy transient kind of month… Most of my brain time was spent working on this laterite play which is on a tight deadline. More on V&B in due course…

Oh and a random quote to end... It's a lovely line. I'm thinking about it in the V&B context.

"That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die."
- H.P. Lovecraft

The fruit of immortality (IFS - 2)

So we all know that Vikram has to get Betal down from the tree and in the course of things a story is told. Vikram answers correctly, the ghoul escapes and we’re back to square one. And this is captured in a series of twenty five tales… But where does the story really begin, and where does it really end?

I’ve been reading a version of the text by John Platts, translated to English from Hindi (where the tales are called Baital Pachchisi) which was translated from the Braj version, which was originally the Sanskrit text - Vetala Panchavimsati. The origins of the English text prompt two conclusions – this text has been translated many times rendering it pretty full of holes and inaccuracies; there is no really definitive English text.

Sadly I do not know Sanskrit, so digging up a comprehensive text is an archeological exercise (which I might pursue later if I find any leads) and I will continue working with the text I currently have first published in 1881 and with an Indian edition printed in 2000. A quick disclaimer – I’m basing my conclusions on a slippery text so I don’t know how much of what I’ve deduced can be authentically verified. The plan is to engage with enough matter to use as a point of departure for my own re-imagining. I’ve made the archeological side of it a second priority for now. However I would really appreciate any advice or pointers or information on this front.

The text opens by establishing Vikram as a wanderer figure. He is ruler of Dharanagar. But he has left the throne having chosen to “wander from land to land and forest to forest.” In his place his younger brother Bharthari rules. The story snap-shifts gears and speaks of a holy mendicant who chances upon a fruit of immortality gifted to him by a deity. He gives the fruit to his wife, who freaks out. “This is a great evil we have to suffer! For becoming immortal, how long shall we go on begging alms. Nay to die is better than this; (for) if we die, then we escape from the trials of the world.” (All direct speech in the text sounds like this – god help me!)

So the mendicant says immortality is a gift for the King. So he gifts the fruit to the King. The King is pleased and rewards him for the gift and decides to bless his queen with eternal youth and gives the fruit to his Queen. The Queen gives the fruit to her ‘paramour’ – a certain kotwal (an official of the court). He in turn gives it to his mistress – a courtesan. The courtesan - thinking like the mendicant - decides that immortality is a gift for the King and presents the fruit to the King. After this passing the parcel session the King challenges the Queen on the fruit. She lies and says she ate it and (predictably) the king produces the fruit that has come full circle and calls her a liar, to which the Queen has no response.

The King in true dramatic fashion says “The perishable wealth of the world is of no use whatever; for through it one must ultimately fall into hell.” (The usage of hell here is such a clear indication of conflicting theosophical sensibilities, continually at work.) Bharthari says – I quit – eats the fruit and assuming the guise of a devotee retires to the jungle.

This sets-up for the return of Vikram to his throne, but not before an encounter with a demon that was sent to guard the throne in his absence. But more on this later...

For now I remain fascinated with this seemingly innocuous tale of the immortal fruit. I immediately reacted to its predictability. And then found its circular narration mildly interesting. But I wasn’t really sure of why we were being told of Vikram’s brother and this strange fruit. Then the placement of the story allowed me to make a connection.

By placing this mini-story at the prologue of the text, the authors of the piece are hinting via metaphor at the essential construction of the entire text. Viewed as an extraneous preamble it becomes superfluous and can be ignored. But regarding it as a self-referential device (much like the punning of character names in the openings of Sanskrit drama) the story becomes an incredibly stunning prologue to twenty-five tales of the ghoul. If we view the ‘fruit of immortality’ as the symbolic equivalent of an orally transmitted story, the story becomes richly dialogic with the main cycle of stories.

And isn’t this the nature of stories? Handed from the old to the young, from the oppressed to the powerful, given with devotion as the token of lovers, received with dismay as the machinations of infidelity, causing suffering, sorrow and joy in equal measure in differing circumstances?

I feel that the radial nature of Indian mythology is richly present in this set of stories, within stores, within stories… And like all classics, the end may well be predictable but the journey undergone in one cycle of the tale is the most interesting aspect.

By placing the story of Bharthari as a prologue, we are given a taste of things to come. In addition to presenting us a miniature structure of the larger tales as a reference point, it raises several thematic concerns that are explored later. Sexual infidelity, suffering caused by dishonesty, the nature of responsibility and the futility of material gain – all enclosed within a fantastical world of moral collapse.

This story is a microcosmic prologue within the cycle of tales, and for the writer in me – food for thought in creating my own little microcosm of the world around me.

My next venture... (IFS - 1)

The story of Vikram and Betal has fascinated me ever since I first encountered it, either in the Amar Chitra Katha comics or the Chandamama magazine, where I eagerly read it with a mixture of fascination, awe and horror.

The story has called to me again and I will be spending the rest of the year searching for a way to tell the story as I see it, within a dramaturgical context. Before the words reinterpretation and retelling become leveled at this venture, I must say that it is only mildly involved in an archeological effort to exhume a set of medieval folktales. I prefer to view the whole process as a re-imagining of the myth within a modern urban context – the end product being a play script.

Much of my initial efforts have been to immerse myself in the world that the original text evokes with a view to finding useful points of departure. Once this immersion begins the writing process has kicked off and that's where I hope I can share all the excitement the process has to offer. This is primarily a creative venture, an extremely personal one, but I hope to be as inclusive as possible on this journey. I'll be documenting most of the physical journeys with photos and will share notes that inform the creation of the text.

At the outset I'll be looking to explore a few core issues. The relationship between Vikram and Betal lies at the heart of the story. It sets up the primary frame for the rest of the twenty five tales that follow. This essentially antagonistic dynamic seems to me the engine that will drive the entire content of the piece. Personally I always thought that the two characters were twin sides of the same coin - dual personalities forming one entity.

One is the king – the one who sits on the seat of all knowledge and as a consequence must grapple with morality to ascertain his fitness to the throne. The other is the ghoul – the undead force that teeters on the brink of insanity and is above all moral considerations, but subjects the more temporal aspect to its constant self-defeating inquiry. This duality is fascinating when applied to larger systems and contexts, where so called forward movement has stalled into cyclic degenerative patterns. Drawing the appropriate parallels, with due regard to the suggested philosophic import, at the same time keeping the aesthetic in mind, will be the challenge.

Additionally I'll be consciously exploring the form of the play and toying with a dramaturgical technique known as polyvocality. Polyvocality uses multiple linguistics strategies which simultaneously co-exist within a single play. This form resists the notion of a single authorial voice in a narrative, supplanting it with a number of variable discourses. This is an attempt to resist categorization into a particular genre and at the same time foreground the dramaturgical form as not merely a carrier of content.

The resultant piece I hope will do justice to the cyclic narrative of this ancient frame within a frame story.

Crab at the NCPA Experimental

After a successful opening at Writer's Bloc...
Crab is on again ...

March 31st, April 1st, 2007 - NCPA Experimental
April 5th, April 6th, 2007 - NCPA Experimental

Tickets are priced at Rs. 150/-
Call 22824567 for booking.
Email qtp@vsnl.com for more details.


Reviews

Ram Ganesh Kamatham’s Crab runs in every direction: the narrative scuttles back and forth in time, skips from character to character, pokes at the problems of urban life and even mountaineering. The set recreates both metropolis and mountain, and helps realise the emotional pitch and intensity of the tautly written script.
- Outlook

What stands out is Kamatham’s spare style – his frugal use of words fuels tensions even as it reins them in, resulting in a controlled piece of drama…
… Arghya Lahiri’s artful direction and aesthetic use of light – shadows and stark pools of light charge an atmosphere that’s already bristling with emotion…
- Time Out

… makes apparent the difficulty of communication and the sheer power, need and joy of it.…
… explores the intensity, pain and fragility of relationships against the backdrop of the alienating concrete jungle…
…Arghya Lahiri’s direction is austere but sharp and lucid. The design is stark and arresting…
…luminous with poetic lines and a very intricate, very delicate filigree of emotions…
- Mumbai Mirror

A director’s coup with superb casting.
- Tehelka

… sky bound, with harsh bursts of firecracker dialogue…
… Crab has four characters, but one who matters. Zamiel. The existential heir of Meursault in his remorseless commitment to the truth and Gregor Samsa in his love that is deeper, more willing to take risks. In 2007, when achievement and success are defined by measly measures of employability, disposable income, group dynamics and other corporate-speak, the “alone-ness” of Zamiel is even more stark. And therefore quite darkly romantic…
- Indian Express