THRISSUR: Only a few works of art possess the ability to tear down the status quo with an almost surgical precision; ‘Crime 27 of 1128’ written by famous playwright C J Thomas, is one such example. Visualised in the form of a meta-theatre production, the work which is a dark satire on the motif of death had garnered much acclaim as a damning indictment of the role of media, family values, legal system and capital punishment. And it was an adaptation of this experimental piece, directed by Sasidharan Naduvil and brought to the screen by Rangachethana, that attracted a sizeable crowd to Kerala Sangeetha Nataka Akademi on a Sunday afternoon.
“Crime 27 still remain relevant five decades after its inception. It is originally meant to be a two-three hour play, so we trimmed it down a bit. But we have taken extreme care to capture the essence of the work,” says director Sasidharan Naduvil.
The story unfolds as a conversation, interspersed with philosophical insights and qandaries, between a Guru and a Shishya. The Guru, with an immortal statement, “death is a joke for the departed”, takes his Shishya on a journey through the purported murder of an labourer at a kiln by his colleague. The scenes flip through a newspaper office where the death is equated in terms of number of columns, then to the home of the departed labourer where the mourning has already given way to arguments on sharing the compensation and finally to the judicial system, where the entire premise of capital punishment is critiqued. The Shishya dons the role of a journalist named Mathew in the play. On an entirely different plane, the Guru and the Shishya continue to indulge in philosophical arguments.
According to playwright Alex Vallikkunnam who had adapted the work for the theatre for the contemporary audience to great acclaim in 2010, the very essence of the work lay in the roles attributed to Guru and Shishya.
“The original is philosophically diverse, with so many levels of narration. In the original production, the Guru narrates the story for his disciple and the audience, and there are several scenes where the duo clashes with the characters in the narration. When I directed the play, I had a separate space set up in the stage for the Guru and Shishya, who are neither actors nor directors. There are also several scenes like the one where the Guru hides from an outside group who wants to invite him for a conference, which has no connection with the previous scene and would only serve to confuse the audience. So, I had such parts trimmed down,” he said.
