Experimental theatre is strongly finding its ground with each passing year and making its presence visibly felt via new packages with every stage-production. It’s true that the pioneering stalwarts of modern-day theatre have long been laying down the spadework for evolution of innovative mediums of theatre right from proscenium to street plays.
Going beyond stage space, i.e. expanding the proscenium to auditorium zones amidst or in front of the spectators’ gallery, employing paintings as the backdrop for scene and setting-change in the play, usage of songs as relief and meaningful, reflective interludes within the drama, epistles as a communicative mode between characters, backscreen projections, visual effects on stage like generating rainfall all this and much more are frequently happening in new-age stage-presentations.
Recently, reputed Hindi theatre-group Proscenium has thoroughly explored the thriller premise with an impressive art-direction, good usage of props and powerpacked histrionics. Based on renowned English playwright Frederick Major Paull Knott’s Wait Until Dark, the Hindi adaptation is done by Dr.
Bindu Jaiswal and credits for design and direction go to Sheo Kumar Jhunjhunwala. Titled Ek Anokhi Gudiya, the play was staged at Kolkata’s Gyan Manch with two more shows to get performed on the coming Sundays of April 23 and 30 respectively.
Adept at framing intricate, crime-oriented plots, Knott is famous for churning out classics like the London-based stage-thriller Dial M for Murder, which was afterwards reeled in Hollywood by another all-time great crime-suspense filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock and of course, the spine-chilling 1966 play Wait Until Dark, which was first rendered at the Broadway theatre. The following year witnessed the release of its screen-version.
The script of any murder-mystery ought to be taut and gripping only to retain audience-attention. However the duration of 115 minutes with a 10-minute interval may weigh down heavily on the nerves, especially in the second half.
Though Ek Anokhi Gudiya opened with three mysterious characters descending on the stage with arms flashing in their hands, a high-octane thumping music blaring in the background to give away hints of an ensuing intrigue in generous doses and the stage looking perfectly set for the conspiracy drama.
The plot pivoted around three conmen Mike, Croker and Harry Roat tricking a blind countrywoman Suzie Henderson into believing that her husband has committed a woman’s murder nearby and that the cops would eventually suspect him of the offensive act and chase him out for arrest.
In reality they are in frantic search of a doll with heroin hidden inside it to make some fast bucks and be wealthy overnight. The musical toy they think was unknowingly peddled by the innocent woman’s photographer-hubby as a favour to a woman (here an Italian actress Lusiana) who wanted to send it as a gift to a little girl lying in her sick-bed.
But the doll reportedly never reached its destination to the child as it meant to be. Plus a lady by the name Lisa was suddenly killed and none knew the reason why.
Roat later on confessed before his ‘partners in crime’ to have executed her for being hostile in his mission and it was she who at his behest had brought the two henchmen together inside the couple’s flat by intimating them through letters.
Roat as the kingpin of this entire subterfuge had rightly hunched that the doll was kept concealed at the transporter’s place and that his wife was aware of its whereabouts. But little did he know that Suzie’s maid Gloria would steal the doll out of jealousy, realizing that it was not hers and put it away somewhere else.
All three posed as different identities to the woman who they used as a pawn in their game and kept a constant eye on her house from a distant phone-booth by operating the venetian blinds of the window in her living room.
But as man proposes, god disposes. And the truth never lies buried for long. The intuition or the sixth sense of a visually- impaired person is way stronger than any person with normal eyesight.
For instance, Susie wondered why the male visitors one by one regulated the window blinds in the pretext of a dimmed vision despite there being enough light in the room.
The tension was rightly built up, the intensity was deep too but wish the thriller could have been slightly crispier, tighter and shorter to emerge a winner all the way.
The scuffle-scene between Susie and the antagonist Roat was compelling and finely choreographed. It helped evoke a nail-biting climax.
