can psychology and theatre coexist (1)

8/7/2019 can psychology and theatre coexist (1)

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Can psychology and theatre co exist? Some reflections on the literary spaces in theatre

through psychological excavations within a play titled Park, by Manav Kaul, performed by Sifar

theatre group, Hyderabad , February 2011.

Sifars new production Park was a humorous, yet a thoughtful take on Indian modernity. Somewhat

taking on and confronting our fast paced urbanity, quietly into a little corner, and interrogating its

threatening existence. Park was modestly premiered on a Sunday morning (!) to a packed audience

(!!!), mostly young adults and some very old couples, at a small niche in Banjara hills. The space La

Makaan (trans-The House) has become a new, urban innovative space for articulating quiet

innovative dissident voices. It frequently hosts theatre activities, art shows, talks, lectures etc and

also runs an informal cafeteria to earn its expenses. La Makaan, as i have come to know, is a tiny

cosy bungalow, lent to alternate voices in the heart of prime locality, almost free of cost (!).

Unbelievable Utopia, isnt it?!

So, as one reached the venue, one encountered a set, humbly designed to occupy the otherwise

sitting space of the audience. The reversal of the space, the sets in the lowest level and the

audiences chairs on the theatrical proscenium, made it a fantastic, yet sensitive statement. Its

reversal, of course was not done to claim any provocative gesture but to use the quiet courtyard of

the bungalow, with ample trees and plants as a setting for the park. The audience sat above on the

proscenium, almost in a classical format of an amphitheatre, looking down into the sets. This

reversal, almost instantaneously, and psychologically, helped in maintaining a democratic zone of

theatre, not as an activity of educating the masses, but carrying on a humble task of narrating stories

at a grassroot. The sets were designed by an interior designer and an architect, for whom theatre

is not a source of livelihood, but a source of alternate energies. Her humble experiment here

seemed very quiet, yet magical.

The sets calm visibility almost made one think they were not done up. Just decked around a couple

of trees, were kept three wooden benches. But for the smoke emanating from the incense sticks

discretely placed behind the benches and trees, the set was immaculate, and yet not bare. The

smoke in the morning sunlight reminded me of the burning leaves in Indian public parks. Often early

in the morning, public cleaner s would collect dead leaves in a pile and light them to enjoy some

early morning warmth in the morning dew of a lawn. The light designer had placed, in good day

time light, one strong yellow light, prominently falling on a bench with shadows of leaves showing

through it, to replicate the morning sunlight falling on a park bench. The natural sun was showing

through the artificially created light smoke. The leaves were falling automatically from the trees on a

quiet winter Sunday morning. The psychological scenery was set thereon.

The play began with the empty sets and strident sounds of a school kid, shouting out his rebellion for

being sent to the school. He did not want to go to the school. The sound of footsteps and the

variations in his voice revealed that he was being chased by someone. Here, entered the kid, being

chased by the protagonist, a young adult; chasing a kid clad in a shabby school uniform. The kid, in

his uniform, looked comic and a somewhat pathetic sight. He was having trouble running straight. It

is revealed that he is a special child being bullied constantly to go to the school. His name, Hussain,

subtly also suggested his religious identity. It is revealed that the kid often hid in the park when

bunking school. The narration goes further and this disconnected part of the scene seems a subtleintervention in the straight, real, chronologically timed narration of the play. The young college


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fellow chasing the kid is a very small cameo in the larger play. The kid exits, and simultaneously a

young lady, a psychiatrist, visits the fellow in the park. It is a bizarre junction where the protagonist

suddenly becomes quiet and stops the chase with the kid; he becomes a different character, a self

conscious, older replica of himself, his funny laughing childhood has abruptly ended. The kid runs

out and exits swiftly. The young lady is treating the fellow from some illness. Why she has called

the patient to come to a park instead of a psychiatric couch, is unexplained...her restlessness and

strain reveal that she is also a young doctor, equally confused about her boundaries and her role.

They are in love, but they are not sure of the relationship. From a doctor and patient relation, they

have moved into zones of love and bonding, but are unable to acknowledge the shift in relation...

She leaves him over a confrontation, mulling over a book that he is unable to read, considering his

state of mind. And here on, more interventions, in the form ofreal characters in the play arrive

into the frame of the park, one by one. First an overfed, domineering, street macho comes in and

shoos the quietly sitting protagonist, off his seat, to sleep on the bench he had occupied earlier.

Showing full psychic signs of a serial addict, his only addiction is an overconsumption of food- a

strategy to avoid facing the anxieties of the real. He wants to just plonk himself asleep, to avoid the

unease of his childs annual results that are being announced later in the evening. It turns out that

the protagonist himself recognizes the man as the father of Hussain, the same child that was

suddenly chased away earlier. A subtle psychological clue to the layers of disjointed time is scripted

with the question from this man to the protagonist about how he knew the name and identity of the

child. Cast humorously, albeit with a patriarchal streak, the father is the personification of an

unprivileged class that searches and dreams through the eyes of their children. They understand

they are unable to confront the systematic chaos of their own times due to their lack, in education

and other areas. They become the marginalised; quietly commanding the public spaces of our cities;

thus, often these spaces appear as desolate places and sites of visual pathos by the middle class andelite of our society.

Here, the protagonists introspective state becomes a theatrical zone where characters from

memory constantly intervene to play an absurd narration of clinging presences. Theatre here, for the

viewer, becomes a sight of double introspection. The public space, for the actor and as well as the

viewer, becomes a site in which one begins to negotiate with the passivity of being individual into

becoming an active, intelligent citizen.

While the protagonist is forcefully shifted to another bench by this bullying character, a moment of

temporary peace is scuttled by the entry of a meek, slimy, spineless character that starts to nag him

into giving up his seat. This character turns out to be the math teacher of Hussain! He has been

portrayed as a character who begins a dialogic debate with the protagonist as well as the father,

towards the possessiveness of the space. The trivial park bench becomes a crude symbol of our

public spaces; As patriarchy of the system tries to fitfully grip and lay claims to it as a private

possession. Here, the father, the teacher/ the government bureaucrat, hand in hand prick and

pierce the day to day breathing patterns of the underprivileged, intelligent but downtrodden, to

claim possessive rights, sometimes in the name of parochial identities, or through explicit violent

means. They try to claim full rights over the system, that keeps slipping out of their intentions every

now and then.... Though these critical comments where prevalent in the play through humour, one

saw that the author was not blaming or morally judging any set of people towards their problematicforms. The script mostly amplified humorously, the reflection of our Indian contemporary society,


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almost as if it is being looked through a laughing mirror. All the categories that are opened up are

seen as desolate and mute categories within a larger corrupt system.

Through the voice of the main protagonist, a man growing up in a big city where fundamentalism

and patriarchy go hand in hand, various layers of time, disjointed and broken as zones of memory in

his mental imaginary, are put together as one space/time in the play. His excavations of his memory

were replete with his interrogations with his father, his math teacher, his own childhood, and his

recent rejections by his lover. These nameless characters are discretely peppered over the

background of a multicultural nation of perplexed individuals; most obviously evident in the

character of the school teacher, who teaches mathematics but takes keen interest in psychology, is

Marathi, but cannot speak or understand a word of the language, is effeminate in his mannerisms

but becomes a macho street letch, and is meekly repressed, and yet morally correct...this becomes

obvious as he constantly tries to evade and avoid his sexuality and his desires. Even while letching

lewdly in a public park, he feels sweat forming on his face, cheeks and his entire body; and yet he

magnifies it only as a magical, divine experience. His character, though replete with complexities, is

shown as a fluid persona that can open up negotiations between the liberal and the uneducated

macho, although with very painstaking negotiations.

There is another layer in the play: the back side of the park, the concealed space where each

character asks the other to depart to. This is a place where animals are kept, almost like a badly

maintained zoo in old public parks ...the leftovers of nineteenth century Victorian menageries. This

space is not revealed but is another subtle device used by the writer to evoke the subconscious

realm, to ask our questions from...it is not described and directed too well to open up as an active

site. Instead, it is the openly visible public space of the park that becomes the site of delirium,

violence and confrontations of various characters, washing their dirty linen out rightly and candidly.

The play, in a surreal way, was nothing but a monologue of the young Muslim man, perhaps dyslexic

as a child, educated from the under classes, standing at an intersection, between negotiations with

his childhood, his father, his male mathematics teacher, and his education, his new love affair, and a

fast moving, dynamic urban setting, wherein, the public park becomes the only refuge for laying and

layering time, to become still and silent. It was a delicate tale of a generation of young drifters,

clutching and releasing various nuances of identities: their immaculate social formations and sudden

destructions in the liberal, globalised capital world.

The triumphal trophy of these direct confrontations with hidden ghosts from his past comes to the

protagonist in the form of a small sweet that the young Hussain comes and bestows on the older

fellow. His quixotic struggle for acceptance from the father, and his compromising peace with his

school teacher becomes a subtle act of resistance from the abjectness of his character.

The actors played their roles well, though could have created better dexterity at the beginning and

the end of the play. The two ends of the narration seemed loose and self consciously articulated by

all the actors. In terms of direction of the play, the language was not able to highlight the important

layering of time and psychology of the main protagonist. In fact, these meditations in the script were

so subtle to grasp, that I wondered if it was only me who was seeing these scripted subtexts or they

were absorbed by the viewers too....Hidden underneath the farcical noise of the characters, the

implications were not handled too strongly into direction! Possibly because the recognition of


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psychiatric association is a new and novel zone in our middle classes, the directorial language fell

negligently short to accommodate that as a point of political intervention of the play.

It was not a grand, heavily budgeted large scale production. On the contrary, it was a small, humble,

domestic melange of professionals, semi professionals, and non traditional middleclass audience.

The Park was a discrete reminder of the need to perform fiction and the need to locate through

fiction, an urgent introspection and self criticism of the construction of self hood in minute distinct

ways, like while sitting on a park bench!

Perhaps it is- a mute mental disease- the confrontations with the Self; considering the pace and

chaos of day to day existence. That it is the most difficult activity and the most heart wrenching task,

is most aptly put by a French thinker, Gilles Deleuze, Genuine thinking is a violent confrontation

with reality, an involuntary rupture of established categories...underneath all reason lies delirium,

and drift".

Rakhi Peswani

February 2011,

Hyderabad

can psychology and theatre coexist (1)

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