Quick Death
August 14, 7.15 p.m.
Venue: Sir Mutha Venkatasubba Rao Concert Hall
A no-holds-barred experiment of image and scene shifts, ‘Quick Death' tries to make sense out of breaks and disconnections rather than settle for the neat narrative. Interestingly, director Sankar Venkateswaran admits to being influenced by film classics as well as film noir, and hardboiled crime fiction!
Launching Theatre Roots and Wings was also to hone a sequential, logical process for training body, voice and mind, and exploring their integrated expressivity to achieve artistic autonomy for actors. ‘Quick Death' had the physical actions/score/text that the director wanted for this process. It had drama, conflict, urgency, high stakes, levels of commitment.
Venkateswaran explains: “Place a gun against a man's head and he knows he wants to live! Death is the gun placed at the head of all living creatures — the goad of evolution. The characters in ‘Quick Death' are trapped in the unending ‘dance' of Death. It seduces them, they play with it, face it, try to escape it, die, then they come back for more. In this age of unending war on terror, whole societies are trapped in the same deathly ‘dance'.”
In playwright Richard Murphet, the director found the best of Artaud and Beckett, the theatres of Cruelty and the Absurd — major influences on contemporary practice. The two men and one woman who inhabit the play are caught on a roller coaster of action. The disembodied voice-overs (Narration? Monologue? Eyewitness account? Radio frequency?) open up a space between action and words that allows a multiplicity of interpretations by an audience. Using repetition as a structural device, associations are networked without the centrifugal force of cause-and-effect logic.
Viewing the actor as a ‘mudra' and the play as something that happens in the audience's imagination, Venkateswaran adds wryly: “I depend on the actor as much as in any other theatre, but my theatre emphasises the role of acting.”
What risks have you taken in opting for the enigmatic and the fragmentary?
Doing theatre is the biggest risk, a spirited journey with no guarantee of success.
How do you break the old moulds, and yet communicate thought and emotion?
The necessity to break old moulds comes from the desire to communicate thought and emotion at a deeper and more profound level. In theatre, they are communicated through the actor's body, in physical actions, which I emphasise.
Wasn't it a challenge to drop language, a mighty tool in theatre?
Imagining 51 scenes in 50 minutes was a challenge to me, falling 50 times to the actor, kicking open a door 50 times and always closing it in the short blackout for the stage hand, operating 160 cues in 50 minutes to the lighting designer!
As we deal with “unparaphraseable” realms of experience — death, love, jealousy, hate, entrapment, sex, orgasm, petit mort, money, drugs, epilepsy — actions speak, not words.
What kind of an audience do you have in mind for such experimental work?
Audience from any walk of life. Ideally, everyone should have his or her own subjective little moment to take away from the play. And, hopefully, what they take home would lead them into a new insight on life.
If you had to sum up what the play is about?
At the moment, to trigger your imagination, I wouldn't.
