Amplification of the face

Jacob Rajan says a good mask is a combination of trance and technique

Bengaluru Karnataka 14/11/2016 Jacob Rajan, writer and Actor of Krishnan's Dairy, Pic to go with Metro Plus Report.
Photo: Sampath Kumar G P

Jacob Rajan didn’t follow his parent’s wishes of becoming a doctor. Instead, the New-Zealand based actor chose to study at drama school, a decision that was a turning point in his career.

His performance of Krishnan’s Dairy, which he also wrote,received international acclaim for its technique and story. “At the drama school, they had a course requirement to create a 20 minute-devised piece,” Jacob said as he was attending to last-minute adjustments at Ranga Shankara. “They didn’t teach masks at there, but I was determined to use a mask. The play is set in a dairy shop that is unique to New Zealand. These shops are primarily run by immigrants.”

Krishnan’s Dairy, a performance of masks, follows the life of a shopkeeper and his wife. “They are two sides of the same coin. The husband has moved far away home to start a new life and to run a lucrative business. His wife is desperately home sick. They are both united in doing what is best for their son. The husband believes New Zealand, a land of opportunities, is good for their son, but his wife differs.” It is a love story, he stresses, but not the popular culture view on love. “Being brought up in the West, romantic love was shouted out at me from everywhere, from the televisions to even advertisements. But the play is about an arranged marriage, where couples sometimes meet for the first time on the day of the wedding. How can you say falling in love is better than growing in love? How can you quantify that? The expectation of romantic love is large. In an arranged marriage they find love.” For research Jacob spoke to five different dairies in Wellington. “One particular person was the youngest among four children. Her parents used to run a dairy, but the mother died of cancer. The father sold the dairy, and went home, but returned to New Zealand and bought the same dairy. To me that was monumental love. That parallel story was the tipping point.”

Jacob’s parents too had an arranged marriage, and he says this production is a “love letter” to them. “My father was a psychiatrist and my mother worked a couple of jobs.”

To learn the technique of masks, Jacob had attended John Bolton’s workshop. “He has a theatre school in Australia, but his wife was in New Zealand at the time, so he held an Italian half-mask workshop. I travelled to Italy and studied there for three months. The masks are also influenced by Balinese half-masks.”

Jacob has used masks because of their incredible power of releasing the imagination of the audience. “Masks are an amplification of the face, and they also amplify the body. “A good mask is a combination of trance and technique. You have to be possessed by the mask. In masks, the character comes from outside in, which is exactly opposite in the Western technique where the character comes from inside out.”

A solo performance of two characters (Jacob plays both husband and wife) had its challenges.

“I have to change the masks in a hundredth of a second. I wanted to create an illusion of a dialogue,” says Jacob, who collaborated with director Justin Lewis.

Jacob has received varied responses.

“For some audience it was a delight to see the fusion of mask, an Indian story and music. At its core, the performance is a love story. When I performed in New Zealand, everyone knew about corner stores, but they never thought about the people who run them. When I performed in the UK, the audience picked up on the element of racial violence. Though that is not the focus of the story, I took credit for it!” he laughs, adding: “Now, after 20 years, the performance returns to its source.” Jacob speaks a little Malayalam in the play. “I took down lines by rote from my mother,” he concludes. Krishnan’s Dairy, presented by Indian Ink, New Zealand, is being staged at Ranga Shankara on November 16 at 7.30 p.m.

Tickets are priced at Rs. 200.