CHENNAI: A road less travelled is Koothu-p-Pattarai founder Natesan Muthusamy’s play Vandichodai. Staging it for the second time since it was written in 1985, Kalai Cholan, who helmed the play over five days recently, says it was a script very close to the heart of his mentor.
“The play is good enough to hold its own in any period. That is our way of paying tribute to the pioneer of experimental theatre, whose 70 major theatre productions had been identified by UNESCO as one among the five learning centres for theatre in the world,” says Kalai Cholan, noting that not a word of the script and dialogue was changed.
Staged first in 2016, the play won the hearts of the audience. Crafter Muthusamy was known for rhythm in his play. It was an alchemical plot, the path of a bullock cart, as the title deems, denotes cart tracks on a mud road. Serious Tamil theatre with good story narration always had a small audience. But that was hardly a deterrent for the cast to churn out a 90-minute delight. To go with the flow of the script of Muthusamy, the complexity, liveliness, and dynamism of the plot were well brought out by the experienced bunch.
The play opens with two strangers in front of a tree. The momentum picks up when one of them says that the play has begun even as the other one climbs to a tree and stays put. Soon, a third person joins the act to reveal the fact that he is aged above 100, only for the other one to say that it makes two of them. As the chatting centres around antique medicinal healing touches to his sishya, the traditional ways of the guru concealing a few medicinal secrets are transparent. The fear of a guru that his sishya will do better than him plays in the mind. In a game of two sharp minds, the sishya has all the answers to the probing questions of the guru.
A Ajithkumar and C Rahul as the guru and sishya are perfectly cast. The needling act of the guru and getting it back from the sishya are the cornerstone of the plot which magnifies when the shepherd (effectively portrayed by E Karthick) gets into the act. He sees red when asked to seek help from his wife to increase the number of children. It was very well conveyed through the play that being a labourer is a curse and the tribe has no other means of livelihood.
The play is dotted with several surprise elements to wow the audience. On the face of it, the premise of a simple storyline seems to be intense and powerful due to the natural portrayals of the characters. It is a non-figurative play where the poetic qualities of the writer add to the lustre. As in the pattern of Muthusamy’s scripts, the play depicted the destruction of personal identity through a method called as the cultural crisis, which was prevalent during the time. Hard-hitting as the title suggests, the high point was in the audience being able to see the mystic imageries. The theme of Koothu-p-Pattarai in rendering perfection to contemporary ideas using traditional stage, gets a riot of colour, in simple and pristine form.
The backstage work of Anandhi Muthukumar, AR Ramselvan (assistant director and lightning), N Chandrasekar (co-director ) and V Elayaperumal (production manager) deserves a pat.