Students from Women’s Christian college staged an adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy, a one-act farce here at Hari Shree Vidyalayam auditorium on Sunday.
The play, like the original, was staged under a reversed lighting scheme, that was the opening sequence happens in the dark, but the stage was illuminated following a short circuit, after a few minutes into the play. Whenever a character lit a match or switches on a torch light, the stage gets dimmer. The characters in the play are forced to move around as they would in a blackout and so do not look at each other while delivering dialogues.
“We practised performing the whole play blindfolded so that we knew how it is to be acting our roles in the dark. We tripped and fell many times, ” said Lynn Salomi Daniel, who played the lead character of an artist.
Sid and his fiancée steal some antique furniture from his neighbour Toni’s flat to impress a millionaire art collector, who is coming to view Sid’s work, and his fiancee’s father.
When the power fails, Toni returns early, and Sid’s ex-girlfriend Rhea shows up, and a comedy of events commence. All the girls, some of whom had to perform male characters, said that they had a lot of fun performing in this play.
“It was a challenge for us because we had to play male characters. Also each character was different from the others in terms of the way they talked and body language,” said Ashwathy P G, the students who played Toni.
The actors also explained that they performed different exercises to get used to speaking the way their respected characters did. Toni, for example had a heavily-accented and shrill voice, while Pattu Mami spoke like a typical Tam-bram woman. “We practised saying vowels out loud as our characters would. We worked a lot on our pronunciation — both helped us to speak our dilaogues well,” said Deepika Easwaran, the actor who played Pattu Mami.
Narrating her experience while writing and directing the play, director Samyukta Vaidyanathan said, “I had a rough idea of the sequence of events while adapting the play. The actors were able to improvise while they were practising. For example, there is no chemistry between Toni and Pattu Mammi in the original play. But as we were practising, we were able to include jokes surrounding the two.”
She thanked Crea Shakti, who helped them bring out their production under their campus theatre project, which is an initiative to take theatre to city colleges.