When a group of former students of the School of Drama wanted to pay homage to a beloved mentor, they decided to play to their strengths. Naturally, they decided to stage a play that showcased their skills at storytelling and stagecraft. When the students happen to be veteran filmmakers and writers like Ranjith, Shyamaprasad and VK Prakash and actors like Murali Menon, Manu Jose and Cuckoo Parameswaran, the play was bound to be a much-anticipated event.
Murali adapted Harold Pinter’s acclaimed one-act play The Dumb Waiter for a tightly scripted drama in Malayalam, Maratta Cafè , which was premièred in Kochi on January 19, under the direction of Ranjith. Music was scored by Shyamaprasad, and veteran cinematographer-director Azhagappan was in charge of lighting design. Cuckoo was the costumier. The play was staged at Kanakakunnu in Thiruvananthapuram in connection with Mathrubhumi Books International Literary Festival 2019.
It marked the first production of Sankara Pillai Art and Cultural Ensemble (SPACE), honouring the memory of the founder-director of the School of Drama, G Sankara Pillai.
“We wanted to commemorate the memory of our teacher Sankara Pillai. Although we had been talking about it for some time, finally some of us managed to come together to turn it into a reality,” said Shyamaprasad before the curtain went up on the play in the capital city.
Attention to detail
It was a coming together of talents that had been honed and polished through years of experience on the stage and the screen. The attention to detail was evident in every aspect of the play.
Murali and Manu appear as the two men in a basement room awaiting an assignment from an unseen Shetty, their boss. The third player in the drama is a dumb waiter that dramatically makes its presence felt in the middle of the play. Layer by layer, the play peels away the mystery surrounding the two men, as we learn about the duo, their profession and their provenance. Dialogues that seem trivial and absurd take the play to a hard-hitting conclusion that jolts viewers who haven’t read or seen the play. As the two men’s moods swing from boredom to hilarity, anxiety and anger, the drama relentlessly builds up the tension till the final scene.
One wished Murali had left out that worn-out line about ‘Thekkan’ to refer to people from South Kerala, which was so unnecessary and marred an otherwise fine script.
Shyamaprasad’s music unobtrusively accentuates the tension in the play, without the loud or jarring music that one is used to hearing in such scenes. Many music directors could imbibe sound sense from the way Shyamaprasad scored with his music.
The superb actors effortlessly went through their act even as their characters’ personalities clashed on stage till the end. These students certainly did their teacher proud.
