• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Scenes from Abhilash Pillai's theatre productions

The Heard Melody of Truth

He is famous for what many people called Experimental , some call it Abstract , others call it Elite . Defying being categorized in any particular genre, Abhilash Pillai, Associate Professor, National School of Drama shares his work with the noted theatre critic Kuljeet Singh.

Abhilash Pillai

“It doesn’t interest me/ if the story/you are telling me/ is true./ I want to know/ if you can disappoint/ another/ to be true/to yourself./ If you can bear the/accusation of betrayal and not betray/your own soul./ If you can be/faithless/and/therefore/trustworthy.”

“When I start a production, I visualize it in sounds first and then impart language to my communication for my audience to comprehend the truth of the subject…” ponders Abhilash whose productions always had a unique musical flavour. Unlike many Broadway- adapted-Musicals, his exotic collection of music has now become a sort of director’s signature in almost all the works produced/directed by him.

Abhilash’s works have a wide spectrum of ideas incorporated with Indian and Greek mythology at its focus, at times. “Inner conflict” of Karna in his production Karna with a Korean actor to C N Sreekantan Nair’s Saketam, which is based on the Ayodhya Kanda, Uru Bhangam, a tragedy of Duryodhana and of late the reworking of Clytamenestra by Sujith Shankar, which announces itself as an “Associate Prose Poem: a blueprint for a performance”, every production has rich theatricality and unique subjective appeal per se.

Amongst his most successful directorial ventures in India is a theatrical version of India’s foremost women journalist Anita Pratap’s Island of Blood , which was staged at the prominent theatre festivals in Berlin, Japan and Bharat Rang Mahotsava, New Delhi.

This dramatic work focuses not on a chronological depiction of Pratap's work, but rather on her psychological state as she confronted these various scenes of conflict. By extracting specific moments through the use of video Images and multimedia, it presents a multi-layered picture of political and social turmoil that transcends time and place. Commissioned by and premiered at the body, City-New Perspectives from India festival, an event held in Berlin with a focus on the avant-garde theatre of India, the piece was very well received.

Memories of a Legend is a medieval epic in contempo­rary form constructed on 24 impressions based on The Babur­nama. Given its extreme richness and diversity, one cannot, and we insist - must not - attempt to provide a singular defi­nition of what South Asian identity is, or can be. Our cultures are intrinsically mixed, our traditions opulently diverse, our languages are powerfully many. For this collective project, The Baburnama serves as a unifying focal point in trying to comprehend the contentious nature of the socio-political as well as the very human and fantastical 'realities' that make up South Asia.

Looking at The Baburnama, and more impor­tantly, Memories of a Legend, we find ourselves grappling with 24 miniatures that collectively point us to Babur, the poet, the individual, the outsider; stranger, wanderer, and rejected em­peror from Fergana, conqueror, founder of the Mogul Empire in India and the first man who tried to unify the subcontinent, who was, for all practical purposes, intrinsically part of the South Asian experience, whether he admitted it or not.

Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound with the NSD’ students is a fresh look of the intricate plots of Greek plays. A sort of non-indulgent, lucid and simple production.

Prometheus Bound is a play, which exemplifies man's search for gods. Here, ‘there is a gradual-natural shift from a believing age to a doubting age and even to an agonistic and atheistic age. On certain occasions even gods were questioned. Towards the end, we get some thing close to the modem man's attitude towards the gods. In fact, there is dissatisfaction, incredulity and confusion and nobody trusts the gods anymore.’ People want to believe but cannot do so. Yes, there cannot be any profound truth about the gods as they emerge in the play. Since we are dealing with mythological facts we should suppose that they are true. But even the characters themselves don't necessarily believe in these gods any more than we do today. 'Prometheus Bound contains a lot of scepticism we could say that our own modern doubts are incorporated and accommodated. There is belief and non-belief and agnosticism. But gradually  we get a third view. These things are not so remote from 2000.

Another lesser known but very significant production by Abhilash is Verdigris based on Thakazhi Sive Sankara Pillai’s Scavenger’s son.

Influenced by Siva Sankara Pillai's Scavenger's Son this exercise was chosen not only to see that age and times from a distance but to review it from the modern angle. The story was told in its various hues and colours of the hopes and hopelessness, aspirations and inhibitions of these neglected ones in the present day context, so as to bring this play closer to our culture and lives.

The treatment of the play also takes the form of a journey through different media, starting from naturalism to the present day pop art culture. In other words it shows Indian theatre and its onward march to the electronic techniques. Waste materials like polythene and the raw colours are used in order to capture the desired atmosphere through chemical film slides and animations through which our designer tries to make a different look.
Following this, lighting has been designed to create emotional colours, to highlight evocated incidents and to capture the attitude of a scene. Music has been composed using unnatural sounds and effects to create the feeling from the instruments.

This play is about the lives of the scavengers projecting its different aspects with the hopes and hopelessness, aspirations and inhibitions of scavengers in the background. Valli, the wife of Chudalamuttu gives birth to a son, which brings sudden change in the habits of Chudalamuttu and he tries to amass money to fulfil his dreams about his son. He christened his son as 'Mohan' and takes a vow that his son will not be a scavengers like others. He sends his son to the school which all is forbidden in his class. All this makes Chudalamuttu alienated from his class. The outbreak of Cholera in the scavengers' colony had devastating effect and kills many of them, though the killer epidemic spares Chudalamuttu, Valli and Mohan among the few other survivors, but they too fall in the line with the tragic plight of scavengers' with shattered life.

The stage adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is a slight deviation from the original literary work. The production has evolved through a series of improvisations by the students, with their diverse viewpoints coming into play in their unraveling of the complexity of the novel.  For the protagonist narrator, who struck to us as not only clever, but also as impish, omniscient and wholly incredible as a human being fell back on conventions drawn from Indian folk theatre. Different characters in the text were regionally located in terms of their cultural identifies.  Saleem Sinai, the highly self-concious narrator, who oscillates between the apocalyptic and the expansive, is modeled partly on the Sutradhar in Sanskrit theatre.  The odyssey of the Assiez and the Sinais, overland on the odyssey of the nation, is represented in a mix of idioms drawn from Parsi theatre, Mughal miniatures, and Escher’s graphic designs.  The absorption of religious allegory into political discourse is presented in a fusion of Bollywood visuals through false frames of cinema projected through a big screen on the stage. 

The concept of ‘pickle’ was employed as the storage of history an myths through a conceptual design of space as two corner spaces for Padma and Saleem, with a black hole between them with a lot of whiteness in it, serving as screen for video projections.

Shama Futehally’s Tajmahal  is a contemporary interpretation of the famous and convoluted relationship between Dara Shikoh and Aurangzeb. The whole play is shown through a man’s angle as to what actually went wrong in the making of this country. The historical war, which changed the course of Indian history is the climax scene of the play. Aurangzeb being a staunch believer of the Shariat and Dara, one of the most liberal minded Muslim prince and sandwiched between them, Jahanara who yearned for love which was out of her reach due to an ancient imperial decree which forbade the marriage of a Moghul princess.

Things can change in a day was a Creative exercise of a few performers based on Arundhati Roy's literary work which was neither a play nor a dramatization of any incident. Actors all congregated some 9 days with the piece of writing and discussed threadbare the theatrical and other aesthetic possibilities purely on a personal and private level. Gradually improvising, innovating and improving daily something or the other, 'Things Can change in a Day’, took a shape of an expressive exercise and innovative experiment.

Voices are growing and with them grew responses…an ideal state of improvement for the articulation of the truth of any artistic idiom and theatre is no exception.

Criticism is intense and so does performance.

…and he screamed.