Riveting two days of theatre

Reviewed by Nathasha Samarasinghe

Thrice the curtain rises. Once on a cheerful bureau that supplies husbands for ladies of all sorts, emphatically of all sorts (the play ‘Husbands Supplied’); a second time on a family reunion the reason for which is the thirty second birthday of a brain-damaged and crippled brother who can hardly count his years (the play ‘David’s Birthday’); and the third time on a greasy attic of a house in which a little boy is punished for doing something atrocious, an unspecified act, while downstairs is a family party (the play ‘No Why?’).

As evident from the first impressions that the scenes create, the first play is a comedy that only lightens the mind of the audience so that the two short dramas that follow would be better received and borne. Indeed one needs a clear mind to cotton on to two such wretchedly sad plays back-to-back.

I take the liberty of generalising the reaction of the entire audience in line with mine. It is noticed that though both the tragic plays deal with similar themes, those of injustices faced by children, they inspire such different sorts of reactions from the audience. David’s Birthday inspires this lingering, wretched sadness while one watches a mentally and physically handicapped child suffer from injustices ranging from sniggers and beatings from his two sisters and other boys, to being impliedly abused by a priest.

The play features David’s past and present in a series of flashbacks that are beautifully presented, with economy both on props and characters, making the audience understand the context mostly or only through the words spoken.

David who resides in a ‘home’ is evidently not taken in by either sister to live with them, as is implied at the very end where David sits crying alone on the middle of the stage holding his birthday cake and is not responded to by either of his sisters whom he addresses. This pitifully, tearfully weighs one down and the interval at the end of this play was well deserved by a shiny-eyed audience.

Then came the play in the attic, ‘No Why?’ where little Jake is continually attempted to be coaxed into apologising for “something wicked” that he had done in the course of a family party; but for which the child is either too stubborn to be sorry or is not sorry at all, because what’s atrocious in the adult world is not as wicked in his eyes and he might not have had wrong intension in whatever he did.

Interestingly and arrestingly the act, for which the boy is detained in an attic and blamed by many of the party guests including his parents, is not specified throughout the play. The actors do not make the audience feel that the unspecified act is a void in the play because the tone of their conversation is beautifully rounded off from beginning to end. However, though the end of the play (Jake’s suicide) may be guessed by the tangle of rope lying at the feet of the boy all along, the presentation of it was a shock.

The play ends with Jake’s father leaving the boy alone in the attic promising to be back in the morning hoping for a proper “sorry”. After he’s gone Jake climbs a ladder carrying the rope and the lights go off which makes one feel that it’s the end. Then comes the shock of sudden lightening and the audience perceives the boy’s legs hanging in air. Dead.

The acting skills of the senior students of CIS cannot but be praised for bringing tears to the eyes of many. The plays seemed to run so smoothly till the end enriched by strong, smooth and clear voices which gave one no reason to look away from the stage.

Moreover, marvelously directed, were the light effects, costumes and props in all three plays.

There was perfect economy in the way of props as the same set was conveniently used in all three plays with minor additions and subtractions of a tyre or a barrel or a box here and there of which none seemed idle; everything seemed to be there for some purpose onstage.

As practical were the use of costumes, their colour and style. The fact that in David’s Birthday everyone wore simple, spotless-white clothes added favourably to the switching of roles. Like David’s father who also played his sister’s husband and the priest who abuses the kid; and David’s sisters who had to play both the roles of grown women and little girls for example. It also implied on a more touching note how absolutely white and blank David’s future is or probably will be, by being left alone in a ‘home’.

Then there were the pitch black costumes of ‘No Why?’ which symbolized perhaps the blackness of the unacknowledged sin that little Jake is so nagged about and how black and threatening the faces of the adults around him seem to his fragile thoughts that eventually make him take his own unblessed life.

Dismal feeling

At the very end of the play ‘No Why?’, Jake’s father’s words are repeated with an echo through a speaker as he himself speaks, which inspires the most dismal feeling in the audience as it listens to the father summing up everything that all the others had been saying all the while.

These are the last words heard by the audience before Jake commits suicide and they are the most effective in the whole play made all the more touching by a super echo-speaker-idea.

March 8: The Daily Express, the official publication of the CIS drama club (the souvenir in plain words) smartly sports the headline “Chairman of the Bar Council arrested” and thus on entrance to the premises one is immediately drawn into the case Queen vs. Sir David Metcalfe, he being accused of his ailing wife’s murder, of which the audience is ‘the jury’.

So you sit staring at the stage which is the perfect picture of a court and wait for the case to start and let go none of the little details of the props; the emblem over the judge’s bench, the neatly set places for the prosecuting and defending counsels, the calmly imposing shades of brown used for the entire set….

When the court proceedings start one is indeed more than ready. The first scene is set in courts where the case is heard.

The stately voiced counsels conduct the case with impressive alacrity and one forgets that this is all inside an auditorium. The end of the first scene is when the judge calls for the verdict of the jury and the audience is kept in suspense. In the subsequent scenes which are flashbacks, we see the happy Metcalfe household which makes one feel that a murder is an impossibility. Then comes the scene ‘the night of March 23 in which we ourselves witness the loving husband kill his wife; but not in any context pressed upon by the prosecuting counsel.

He kills her in mercy; she cannot take any more of the pain that cancer gives her. The play ends with Sir David confessing to his friend the whole truth where we also understand that the jury had found him not guilty.

The actors playing Sir David and the prosecuting counsel do a marvelous job in presenting a heated case and you find yourself waiting for them to say more in those imposing voices and the cancer-ridden Lady Metcalfe couldn’t look sicker than she was. The actors move the audience to tears in their last scene together where Sir David gives his wife an extra dose of pills hoping to give her peace.

What I was personally most fascinated about was the conduct of the cast while each of them was saying nothing. They looked so into the case all along that one cannot but feel like one of the jurors, for the judge declares the audience as the jury at the beginning of the trial. They were just living in the scenes.

As much as in the three short plays the effects, the lighting and the sounds, were super cool. Each time an important witness was called into the case there was this horror movie music and a concentration of lights on the witness box. It invariably gave an air of court-ness plus movie-ness (for want of better terms) to the court scene. Then there was the effect of repeating parts of the trial at the end of each scene set in the Metcalfe household.

Decision

This would remind the audience that they are the jury and that a decision between life and the guillotine was to be taken without having seen any of the facts of the Metcalfe household, and having imagined it only through witness accounts. CIS theatre week was Directed by the Head of Performing Arts, Vinodh Senadeera

On the whole, this is far from what one expects a school to do. It was a truly huge change from the light plays with slapstick humour chosen for most school shows. Inspiringly witty, this show only needed more of a spotlight of publicity for many more to have enjoyed it. Cheers CIS!