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.
Starring Abhishek Majumdar and Mallika Prasad
"I am the sutradhar!!! I am pulling this string!!!"
"I can still hear him in my head.
