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Explorations into the unsaid

SANJAY KUMAR

New Delhi was treated to an adaptation of Richard Murphet’s “Quick Death”, in which actors remained mute, only actions spoke.

The imaginative use of light effects needs to be commended

The voices kept increasing in tempo and the lights gradually dimmed out. Finally, it was only darkness, and there was deafening sound all around. Quite an unusual beginning for a play? But that is precisely what Theatre Roots and Wings treated Delhi to — a thought-provoking adaptation of Richard Murphet’s “Quick Death”.

The dramatic script of the Australian playwright belongs to a series of plays, which the group intends to perform in future. Murphet’s text belongs to the theatre genre of the ‘physical text’, which attempts to liberate the actor from the bondage of the written or spoken word. However, the dramatic script is an integral part of the performance. “We have maintained fidelity to the text as much as possible. Murphet’s play, though not so well-known here, is a very difficult read,” commented Sankar Venkateswaran, director of the play and the artistic director of Theatre Roots and Wing.

The playwright was inspired by Antonin Artaud’s call for a radical theatre that made “immediate and visceral connections with the audience.” He wrote this play over 20 years ago as a companion piece to a production of Artaud’s “To End the Judgement of God”.

“Quick Death” revolves around three characters — two men and a woman, caught in a series of cyclic movements of death and revival. The performance powerfully captures the playwright’s vision of a disjunction between word and action. The actors do not speak in this one-hour play. They barely utter a sentence towards the end. However, the voiceover from backstage narrates the action and the audience has to imagine and capture the gaps between the word and the action. The play is the first in a trilogy of sorts planned by the young theatre group on the theme “The Autonomous Actor: the Creative and Interpretative Actor”.
Refreshing experience

It was a thoroughly refreshing experience to see the actors remodelling the ‘form’, moving from a known territory of a traditional actor, and then finally outlining a new method. The performance of 51 scenes ranging from three seconds to three minutes in length manifested the plot in a string of quickly fading and appearing images. The two men and women are caught in a rollercoaster of action. The theme of death breaks new ground in this play, trivialised in the era of real life terror and Hollywood images of stereotyped brutality. When all the three characters keep getting shot and clutch their heart, the audience gets jolted with the athleticism of the actors. “The Actor is the athlete of the heart. We wanted the audience to discover that another kind of theatre is also possible where actors work only with their body, without words,” points out the young director who has himself excelled on the stage as an actor.

The logic of causality between action and word is broken, and the resultant space energises the narrative. The imaginative use of light effects needs to be commended as it captured the actor’s attempts in escaping the conventional ideas of movement and image. The voiceovers brought alive the unspoken words.