 SLATE’s ‘Anniyan’
 SLATE – ‘Stage for Literature Art Theatre Expressions’ - presented their first-ever, launch-play in Tamil, titled ‘Anniyan’ (Outsider), at the
Alliance Francaise auditorium, recently (Oct 21).
This has been inspired by the novel ‘The Stranger’, in French, by Albert Camus (1913-1960), the Nobel Prize awardee for literature (1957), which remains in the West as ‘among the most influential books of our time’. Camus died in a road accident in 1960.
The Tamil adaptation, with the characters retaining their French identities, picturised effectively the unconventional story of an emotionally detached (terrifyingly so), amoral young man Meursalt. He is a faceless man. He does not show any expected emotion at his mothers’ funeral. ‘Mother died today, or may be yesterday. I can’t be sure...” was his reaction on receipt of the
telegram (this play was written by the author in 1946). He does not even wish to see her remains in the coffin. He wears mourning black, and, yet shares a
smoke with the mortuary keeper, beside the coffin. He keeps a nightlong vigil!
Later, Mersault commits a pointless murder. He kills a man he scarcely knows and with no discernible motive. He bombs, into the inert body, four more bullets - “each successive shot being another loud fateful rap on the door of my undoing”: For this thoughtless crime, he is judged a threat to conventional society and sentenced to death. Waiting for his death, he expresses the ‘hope that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration’. He is a stranger to us, therefore.
The play takes recourse to a narrator (Parvati), who sequences the happenings through soliloquies, mostly from a watchful distance. The Theatre presentation also resorts to symbols, two-side masks, minor acrobatics, figures, and colours to stress abstract ideas or concepts. It is stressed that the court of inquiry (into Meursalt’s crime) symbolises
society at large, as a whole, on behalf of the law-abiding community.
The theme tries to exemplify the
philosophical absurdity of life; humanity attempts to find rational explanations for irrational events. Strangely, Meursalt defies all conventions, beliefs, and realises, suddenly, the inevitability of death and he attains peaceful happiness. He comes to terms with life and, more so, with death. Nothing, even death, is any longer a punishment - it matters not whether you die of old age or get executed.
 The expressions and phraseologies in Tamil may not convey to the conventional onlooker much meaning. They appear to be contrived and long-winding. And yet, the mouthfuls are logical, though hard to swallow. The language used in the play is effective and forceful.
Natarajan, as ‘Anniyan’, with his role demanding his bland, expressionless face, still manages to present a wealth of expressions and emotions. Ashok (magistrate-Mozon), Anbarasan (guard/mime), Bhaskar (public prosecutor/ Raymond), Bhoopathi (security officer), Kalpana (Marie: with whom Meursalt has intimate physical relations, a day after his mother’s funeral), Ramesh (Raymond/Celeste), Ramji (judge: visitor senior - citizen home), Sankar (head-senior citizen home), Srinivasan (defence counsel/watchman - citizen home) and Vinod (conscience/salamano) comprise the cast who combine well for an amateur group.
B K Ramesh is the script writer and director, and Sankaranarayanan (the force behind the presentation) is the production-art in-charge. Dr R K Rudhran handled lights and overall supervision.
A play on ‘existentialism' (man must create his own values and live life to the full every minute) is not easy to accept and digest. Nevertheless, ‘SLATE’ deserves warm appreciation for the apparently ‘strange’ presentation.
R Srinivasan
|
