Dead man's cell phone:

Digitally bound beyond the grave

Reviewed by Dilshan Boange

Grappling issues on identity, individuality, privacy and the nature of relationships in this intensely digitalising era through the play Dead man's cell phone by Sarah Ruhl, Sri Lankan drama directress Anushka Senanayake proved her prowess to deliver a good quality full length theatre production to theatregoers.

Seated in the gentle darkness at the British School auditorium I witnessed a remarkable show of thespian talent bring to life a US play that was well appreciated by Sri Lankan theatregoers. The opening announcement that came over the public address system welcoming patrons got interrupted with a cell phone ringtone and thus the all too familiar request to put cell phones on silent mode or switch them off was made.

One astounding truth about the show was that it is the only stage play I have yet watched, after the cell phone's advent to the category of an ordinary mundane utility, where a cell phone did not ring during the show and cause that much resented annoyance!

By looking at the sequence of scenes, the play as a whole in terms of its storyline and dialogue narrative was one which seemed to be possible to dramatise as a performance of the realism mould.

But unless of course the script by Ruhl stipulated the direction to be of the nature of what was performed, the directress seems to have played with elements that blended threads of the surreal and using elements that brought in a facet of miming and dancing, I felt the work also brought out a sense of what may be 21st century 'indie' art.

Innovativeness

The level of innovativeness in the vision of the directress was evident. The single background prop had a very symbolic function to it rather than serving the purpose of a realistic stage set. The visibly onstage stage hands who shifted the props around and doubled as the mime like performers dressed in black added an element of the surreal.

The music signalled in certain ways shifts in the scene's thematic essence. An example is where the 'deadness' of the dead man -Gordon, is established, and before the narrative moves to the point of Gordon's mother Mrs. Harriett Gottlieb eulogising at the funeral service, music that is of the likeness of 'Gregorian chants' flowed in. The other songs and music used were very much of the contemporary kind and added to the performance's texture of western modernity.

Gordon's first words are cut off with darkness that ends the first half of the play for intermission. It was a powerful measure to thrust the image of the dead man on the viewer's mind. A man who is at the centre of the plot but doesn't speak until that moment. His first word uttered -"I" gets cut off as if symbolically the darkness that 'floods in' kills Gordon.

The suspenseful effect it creates is almost as if what one may feel if Beckett's Godot actually arrived only to have the curtain descend without any explanation given as to why everyone waited for him! The stifling of a person's speech is in some ways the killing of his being (within).

Chalana Wijesuriya delivered a compelling performance through which attributes as unapologetic selfishness, brash 'self centrism', and condescension characterised Gordon as a 'living person'. I say so because the play delivers a powerful portrayal of the politics of characterisation in terms of who a person is in his own voice and is 'made to be' through the words of others.

Acting talent

Played endearingly by Dinoo Wickramage with admirable acting talent mercurially moving between expressions that were theatrically sharp; Jean, the timid and modest self effacing young woman who good-heartedly becomes the agent who crafts the character of Gordon after his death shows what power an 'agent' or a representative, be self appointed or otherwise, can wield over the absentee.

How much of our 'self', our 'character portrayal' do we surrender on a daily basis to 'agents', to 'reps' who may at times be institutionally designated to do so, or may be requested by us to do so for necessity? How much of those 'reps' give life to the actual person whom they claim to speak for?

Man is always haunted by mortality. And in consequence what arises to some would be the dilemma of what their legacy left in the memory of the living, may be.

In the case of Jean, she represented that element of goodness in society that believes in using opportunity for sincere good, by making the wife, mother and brother of the deceased Gordon whom she had never spoken a word with, feel good about their lost loved one and themselves in light of what they meant to the deceased.

But it is all fictitious. Jean is the perpetrator of a fallacy to achieve a salutary outcome for the living while constructing an imaginary character that her intrigue causes her to develop a love for.

Digital age

The story is rather telling of how the digital age creates greater pursuits of escapisms for people who find their lives becoming more and more 'atomised' through lack of interpersonal connectivity.

ICT today can distance us as much as it connects us. It can create illusions of connectivity with room for subjective interpretations in ways that cause horrendous misreading.

Jean shows the duality in us that wants to drift in flights of imagination and also yearn for what is true to life and real to the touch. Her own creation called Gordon and the sting of stories she concocts pretending to be a colleague of the dead man, shows how she romances with the idea of fantasy.

At the point where she visits the stationary shop where Gordon's brother Dwight works and drifts meditatively to the feeling of caressing various kinds of paper and says each feels different like 'leaves' or 'branches' and says heaven must be like an embossed invitation card, she shows how the thing affirms to us the physical truth of our existence in this world -the touch speaks to our senses in a truth truer than words.

Sulochana Perera who played Mrs. Gottlieb lived up to her role convincingly as did Tasmin Anthonisz as Gordon's widow Hermia, while Shazad Synon brought to life a soft spoken man with inhibitions whose character complemented Jean's.

An interesting point to note is Gordon and Hermia speak of hidden desires about indiscretions while in bed together.

Hermia's feeling of being no longer desired by her husband had led her to fantasise that she was her own husband's mistress whom he would enjoy being intimate with, to delude herself to think she is appreciated.

Dualities in human self perceptions are undeniable. Self deception can be a powerful thing. But who in fact would Hermia be in such a dichotomised scenario? The story thus also speaks of secret tribulations and insecurities people face in their relationships, one of the most telling lines being when Gordon tells Jean, in the ethereal plane, 'you must be careful whom you fall in love with'. Jean as I saw her is an agent for 'love construction'. She wanted to create impressions of love for, and of, Gordon in relation to his family members. Her agile thinking and clever word crafting wittiness enables her to sound as a believable source of 'revelations'.

This role she assumes also reveals her ability to speak with a poetic touch. When Jean tells Hermia that Gordon, despite his indiscretions, loved her and had said of Hermria -'She walks in, and time stops' it had a powerful lyricism to it that struck me as a line which resonates the feel of what one encounters in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient; in the likeness of a line the Count Almasy may say reposing motionlessly, speaking of his lost love.

When Sri Lankans go to the theatre they like to laugh, I was once told by actor Gihan de Chickera. Comedy is mostly what works here in terms of becoming a commercial success. But Dead man's cell phone isn't really a comedy intended to tickle your ribs and cause fits of laughter.

Although Mrs. Gottlieb says, "I keep forgetting he's dead" in the flow of some mild amusing dialogue with Jean, Sulochana Perera delivered that line with a staid and desolate face.

Yet some laughter arose from the audience to that particular line. How much of the 'darkness' in a 'dark comedy' do Sri Lankan's appreciate? How much of it do we digest and make part of our after thoughts?

Social transformation

Theatre's potential to be a catalyst for social transformation and not serve as entertainment alone lays greatly in the perceptiveness the audience has to the nuances that are messaged as part of the subtext, created partly through tone and expression.

In that sense, whether the Oscar winning American Beauty qualifies as a film with an aspect of 'comedy' in it, in the eyes of many Sri Lankans, could be asked in this context of gauging our collective reception to 'dark comedy'.

Anushka Senanayake and her theatre company, despite being comparatively young in the Sri Lankan English theatre circuit, show immense potential. Dead man's cell phone may perhaps be viewed as an 'amateur production' on account of the visible 'youngness' of the players; but that is due to 'physiology'.

There is no denying the calibre of the talent that unveiled on stage. The production was for certain, a triumph.