Last week i made time to match two plays being stages in R'shankara by Evam a promising theatre company from Chennai. They have become quite popular particularly amongst youth doing both serious and comic plays. Last time they had staged 'Chapter 2' which i missed.

ART

The First of the plays 'ART' was staged from Tue JUly 18th to Saturday 22nd. I watched the show on Wednesday. Accompanying me was my friend Manu (i incidently intentionally:P inflicted the doose of theatre into his blood). I was quite exited about the play because of good promos and publicity. The play narrates a comic yet conflicting situation between three best friends Sarj, Marc and Yvan over a piece of art. Sarj is a kinda of art lover. Marc is a contemplative guy. Vyan is a simplton whos holding on to a fragile job and is just about to be married.

Sarj buys a painting for a whooping 200,000 Francs. Marc sees absolutely nothing to talk about in the painting. Calling it just a piece of 'White Shit', he criticizes Sarj as a fool to have spent so much on virtually nothing. But Sarj doesnt agree, he sees a great piece of art in the paintingand calls it a masterpiece. Most of the play revolves around the comic war of words on this silly issue between the two friends. Poor Yvan, caught between his two best friends is confused and doesnt know which side to take.



First half of the play was dull and looked more silly than comic. It was feeling like i was audiance was trying to laugh or rather forced to laugh than laugh genuinely. Second half was somewhat better and had some good funny moments.

Overall i would say, the play didnt live up to its pre-performance hype and expectations. I expected comedy to run riot, but that didnt happen. The problem here is the subject they have taken is a silly, small issue.  The issue seemed fit to be a funny part of a larger play than the play itself. When you build an entire one and half hour play revolving around the silly, small issue, its a challenging and harder task to insert comedy all along the play, because the scope is restrictive, subject is small. They failed in it to some extent i would feel.

Right throught, the play mainly consisted of too lengthy, expressive, animated  dialogues filled with complex vocabulary and words on the silly issue of painting, which although abstractly sound comic didnt really specifically make me laugh. Plus points, there were some incidents including those of Yvan which made me laugh genuinely. Performance, dialogue delivery, stage were exceptional. Evam have a novel idea of having the audiance attention all throught in having a boy enact playing violin during back stage re-dressing done inbetween the play.
So overall i would say, a good time pass play that didnt live up the pre-performance hype it created.

Python Hysteeeeeria

Python Hysteria was a series of sketches adapted from the 'Monty Pythons'  or 'Pythons' , a popular British Television comedy sketch show of the 60s. Sketches were enacted by only 3 actors Karthik, DMK and Sunil. They were more funnier than ART and almost ran a laughter riot all throught.



The last sketch was a comic adaption of the legend of Hamlet by W'llm Shakesphere. Though most parts were very humorous, sometimes it felt they kind of streched on a single comic issue for too long. One completely different thing was, they involved audiance in making the comedy more livelier.  They promoted as comedy, making audiance to do silly stuff like waving hands, shouting sketch dialogues and even had two of the audiance come on to the stage and play characters!! They made them to do silly things. Now can you call all of this genuiene comedy ? or they are trying to promote something silly and sensational as good quaility comedy.

Its new idea having the audiance involved, but did it have anything really special or spectacular in it? Sure it made us have a great time shouting dialogues like Ofilia( Hamlet's sweetheart) character saying 'CUT THE CRAP HAMLET!!. MY BIOLOGICAL CLOCK IS TICKING!!. I WANT BABIES NOW!!' True, we had a great fun in it, but is that real comedy?.. I mean anybody can do such stunts. In that way the other sketches were better off than the hamlet sequence. But i dont back from saying, it had numerous very very funny moments as well. The best i liked was, when Hamlet jumps onto the stage from behind with the background music of a latest Rajanikanth's movie (Chandramukhi? where he rides a chariot). Also doing backstage acts on front were also refreshingly funny.

Overall it was a great time out, had lots and lots of fun. It was rocking and worth every penny.