Stymieing a giant on stage

Stymieing of a giant on stage.

Went to Kalamandira, Mysore last evening with friends to see Visakhdatta's Sanskrit play Mudra rakshasa adapted to Kannada. This was part of a theatre festival for 3 days. There were two more festivals happening in the same campus for several days. Felt good for the Mysoreans. Have our art sensivity and sensibilities widening? Nice to see many families and youngsters taking to this form of performance than just movies and TVs.. And many organisations too promoting it. Really pleased and pleasing.

Yet what we looked forward to last evening did not happen. Expecting an exhilarating evening, it turned out to be 'ex- hilarious' disappointment due to failure of infrastructure, management as well as intellectual applications.

First, the show was announced to start at 6:30 pm. It did not start even by 7.15. The problem as usual was excused as technical. The sound system of this show piece of Mysore gave way. rIt was enovated spending crores of public money recently. The huge auditorium with its humongous voluminous stage specifically undermines the human scale dramatic performances. It is good for pageants and rallies and drab, insensitive political gibberish. The organisers did not feel it their problem to look at these in advance. They could have at least announced to the sensible public about the delay and apologise for it, instead of keeping them waiting in the inanimate space.

The delay in starting leaves a bad mood to get tuned to even a good performance. But then if the performance itself reduces to gibberish, the play becomes a cruel joke. The stage was not set to a human scale to the legendary story of larger than life almost mythological Chanakya or Kaultilya of early last millennium. The audience came eager to see the dramatising of classic political machinations of all history which saw change of regimes and the use of graft and sex and poison that is of omnipresent significance. We were treated with a drab introduction of frozen statuesque yet puny presence (due to high ceiling stage) of Chanakya and a drab amateurish primary school level serpent dance sequence of a Visha kanya narrating the story up to then. That too for more than 5 long minutes. Then came the stellar performance of Chanakya animating himself to life, and sitting down on the floor of the voluminous stage and starting his monotonic monologue almost like political gibberish that hardly anyone could follow. The memorized recitation reminiscent of a primary school kid with hardly any movement or emotion was the last straw. One could expect what was in store. We left after 30 minutes.

Thinking and talking about the hilarious Stymieing of a mythical giant of Indian political history, gave a lot to feel humorous and laugh about. A hilarious evening indeed, it was.