Playing it straight, playing it real

Moving along into its second week, Colombo’s first English theatre season, Noir, presented by StageLight&Magic Inc., brings to focus a more complex theatre of intensified, intimate acting styles and the deepening darkness of the subject in discussion.

With Michael Holsinger, Shehara Jayasinghe and Aida Mansoor making up the cast, Ionesco’s The Lesson, the one-act comedy that launched the Theatre of the Absurd, is billed for the second weekend of the season. The performance takes place within the claustrophobic interior of the home of an intellectual. Despite the maid’s attempts to dissuade him from taking on any more students, The Professor takes on yet another bright, big-eyed student besotted by the thirst for knowledge.

Clearly lacking in confidence at the opening, the performance gains momentum as the professor slowly discovers that his student is not as smart as he thought she was. He becomes more assertive, and more demanding as he leaps from the intricacies of mathematics to the technicalities and ideology of linguistics, driving the play to its frenzied climax where knowledge confronting ability meet its violent end. And the maid, who watches on, will not prevent the lethal lessons from taking place.

In the performance of the Theatre of the Absurd, how does one play absurd? The performers here simply play it straight – very, very real and convinced in the integrity of the work. Their challenge is that such an intense piece of theatre can get monotonous and they meet the challenge with vocal experimentation, playing around with voices and modulation, expressions, tonalities and ways of speaking. Removed from the contexts of time, place and even a name (as is the case in Absurd Theatre), and caught up in an undiluted emotional moment, what each performer has is the strength of his/her voice and its expression.

Opening on the post-war stage, written by Ionesco, for whom Nazism was incomprehensible, The Lesson, like his other work, evaluates life and the human need to assign meaning, while approaching life itself as an absurdity. Exploring totalitarian control, the performance is in a sense not so far removed from our contemporary reality. With its convoluted philosophies and twisted logic thrashed out in the space of absurdity, the performance slowly takes you to the point of how easy it is to slip into the mindset of violence, where the meaningless subtraction of humanity becomes possible.

Preceded by the Eric Bogosian solo performance work, The Specialist, featuring Ifaz Bin Jameel, the evening of theatre is an experiment in making an audience uncomfortable at many levels. The Specialist, in a matter of ten minutes, which gives the performer as long as he needs to establish contact, make a connection, sustain it for a few minutes and exit on an unbearable high is in a sense a non-traditional theatre of the absurd – not in its overall style but in the absurdity of context.

In the classroom that is the theatre, one man takes centre stage as instructor/ lecturer offering insight on best practice, method and safety on the most unnerving of subjects, discussed in the most casual of tones – torture. The performer, is thus the agent of torture and his audience, passive participants in that moment.

The script of The Specialist, despite its sensitive subject is one that can be – for the want of a better word – ‘enjoyed’ both as a script and in performance, holds Ifaz. Nonetheless, this does not take away from the fact that the subject is difficult and after a series of director-performer conversations on the style and tone of the production, “casual” was explored as a possible option.
“This piece can be performed in many ways,” says Ifaz, who is back on stage after his cameo in Elizabeth and his memorable performances of Shakespeare’s many women in The Compleat Wrks, gearing up for his first one-man performance. For him, what was integral in performance was that the sense of realism was maintained in this short burst of words that tells a cold, hard truth. The piece is not a seamless monologue, rather it is abrupt, disjointed and detached, and the casualness of tone that is adopted in performance rather than trivialising the subject of torture, heightens the tension on the empty space where the performer “throws stark reality out there in the open.”

The Specialist by Eric Bogosian and The Lesson by Eugene Ionesco, directed by Anuruddha Fernando and produced by Chalaka Gajabahu will play at the Punchi Theatre from July 13 to 15. Buy your tickets online at www.etickets.lk. Dialog users can call 444 and purchase their tickets. Official Sponsors for the event are Dialog Telekom, Alankara, Red Bull, Nescafe and Video Image. The official electronic media sponsors for the performance are Channel 1 MTV and YES FM. The official print media sponsors are The Sunday Times and The Daily Mirror.