Realistic fiction vs stylised reality

A few nights ago I watched Fat The Arts’ powerful production 7/7/7, based on the real life trial of Reyhaneh Jabbari, who was found guilty of murder when she stabbed the man who tried to rape her. Her arrest and the case that followed received worldwide attention. Reyhaneh spent seven years in incarceration as the trial dragged on. While in jail, she managed to smuggle out scraps of paper, which were eventually turned into a book, upon which the current production is based.

The project has been helmed by Faezeh Jalali, who is slowly but surely becoming a director to reckon with; particularly after her haunting Jaal. The play was devised by an ensemble that worked on it for over six months, before opening at NCPA Centrestage in December. As with most devised work, it is still being nipped and tucked into shape. However what is interesting is the choice to veer away from realism, and employ wonderful devices and stylised representations in the storytelling. The use of light, shadows and torches all add to the heightened experience. And while the choices were wholly justified, I began to wonder, why is it that so often, artists tend to tell real life incidents through stylistic devices while fictionalised stories through realism

In Jaal, the fictional whodunit around an engineer’s murder in a small village, the same director tries to be as naturalistic as possible. There are charpais, motorbikes and even a boat. While here in 7/7/ , a true life incident has been heightened using movement and chorus work in its depiction.

Part of this might be because creators often need to infuse fictional works with a ‘realistic’ credibility for them to be wholly believable. While, if it’s a true story, the actual incident is already so credible, that there is latitude to almost ‘poeticise’ the telling. Vagina Monologues writer Eve Ensler, in trying to strip away all artifice from the performance of her piece, demands that the actors read from the text and don’t actually learn the lines. Inadvertently, the result is a stylised theatre experience of actors taking on the various characters in sitting position and voice, but never really moving. And it works! We feel for each of the women, whose true stories are being read out, and yet we don’t actually ‘see’ them.

A similar instance is Yael Farber’s Nirbhaya, based on the rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey. The play is testimonial theatre at its most brutal. Five fantastic women, all survivors of violence, each tell their own personal story of being raped, abused, attacked and even set fire to. All intertwined with the retelling of the horrible events of December 6, 2013.

While each woman’s story is gut-wrenching even in the simple relating of it, the stylised devices of a man on a stool, or a large black cloth on the ground, raise the emotional experience to a much higher level. The stylisation allows a subtext that the simple telling cannot. Since the creators don’t have to sell the authenticity of the event to us (unlike in fiction), they have the liberty to explore the emotional and psychological aspects surrounding the event, thereby making the audience understand the trauma in much greater detail.

Real life events are often mundane. No matter how interesting or terrifying or brutal. A fiction story allows for embellishments in the narrative that real ones do not. This is because a true-story needs to be told in all its truth, while a fictional story’s only commitment is to be gripping and interesting. Therefore even something as grandiose and emotional as The Fifty Day War, about the Kargil War based on testimonies by the soldiers’ who fought it, felt a little dull in the story telling. By contrast, Mahua, a much smaller production that told of tribal relocation for industrial development, seemed to be far more powerful and touching. This is perhaps because the play was able to distil all the various tribal relocation stories into one narrative, and thereby leave us with an incredibly tragic and poignant love story, that represented a much greater condition.

As a friend of mine turned to me at the end of 7/7/7 and said: “Realistic or stylistic, who cares! As long as it leaves the audience with an honest portrayal, and a greater understanding of the events that they have witnessed. That’s the point of art, isn’t it ”