Arsenic Neighbours

Everything is not what it seems. What could look like a home with two elderly ladies and their nephews, is not what is the fact. There is always more to it.

The capital was abuzz when just recently at the Shri Ram Centre for Performing Arts, a play titled  ‘Arsenic and Old Lace’ by Joseph Kesselring. The play is a black comedy that revolves around a family wherein two old ladies have a weird tendency to kill the single old men.

The plot of the play is around the D’silva family of Vasai living in an old rambling mansion beside the church graveyard.  The family comprises of two elderly ladies; Martha and Rosa who has a crazy obsession to kill single and lonely elderly men. Jonathan, their nephew who too is a psychopath killer running from the police with his sidekick being a plastic surgeon who continues to operate on him.

Another nephew named Alfie, a schizophrenic, who thinks he is Adolf Hitler. When Alfie buried the bodies with the ladies, he was told that these were the bodies of Jews from Auschwitz. However, amidst all the craziness in the family, there is a sane member that goes by the name Bobby who runs out of ways to deal with his family.

In a candid chat with the director of the play, Nayana Sagar reveals that it is one of the most performed plays in the world primarily in colleges. “Apparently, it has a simplistic plot. But, there are many things that go unnoticed. I have been seeing this play right from my school days and I have seen many directors. There is so much magic in this play, but, they used to show it simplistically. It was never done with an attention to detail,” she says.  Sagar adds, “I always used to wonder If I were to pick up this play, then what are the changes I would bring to it.” She points out that the jews at the time of the holocaust, especially during persecution, they would laugh. In her words, “The play is very sinister as there is a dead body lying around.” But it was not the dead body she was concerned about. She adds, “I wanted to show the brighter aspect. We have tried to maintain the spirit of the original play.” The original adaptation was in Hindi and she had to re-translate the whole play into Bambaiya Hindi. Hence, keeping the originality was a challenge for her. She explains, “It was a challenge all the time but we somehow managed. If I had played along with the religion of the protagonist, then it would not have come across as how it comes.” She further added that it was because they stuck to the various constants from the original play, that the spirit of the play was maintained. The play had intense scenes along with timely strokes of humour and humour is best served when it is not overdone. “There is a farcical element in the play. There is a dead body lying and they are all talking about it as if it does not exist,” she points out.

She further explains, “It’s a dysfunctional family with a psychotic strain and everyone has their zones and they are happy in their zones. So as long as I ensure that they maintain that psychotic strain and they stay in that zone where the character lives, the humour does not go overboard.” She says that humour can go overboard if a psychotic character tries to act normal. On being asked whether she would work with experienced actors or first-time actors, she responds that regardless of experience, the challenges are still there. She says, “The experienced actor always has an ego that ‘I know’ and sometimes it may become difficult for him to unlearn what he has learned. Sometimes, I may not want what he/she has learnt, I may actually want him to go back to scratch and work the character according to my vision.” and as for the case of first-time actors,  that they are always in doubt whether they are doing it right or not. “You get to grow more as a director working with inexperienced actors,” she adds.

She concludes the conversation by offering a word of advice saying, “If you don’t read, you are dead. How can you act? You need to read and work on your personality, awareness and you need to scale up all the time.”