By C.K. Meena
Lucky Lobster can be called a political play
LIFE'S PLAY Lucky Lobster
That Swar Thounaojam hails from Manipur was an inconsequential detail in the context of her debut “Fake Palindromes” staged this January, but a matter of inescapable significance when it came to her second play, “Lucky Lobster”, staged at Ranga Shankara last weekend. Try as she might to universalise it by refusing to name places or characters, it ends up addressing those for whom the ‘North-East' blurs into a single amorphous entity. Like the Kashmir ‘situation' we often talk of the Manipur ‘situation', which we reduce to Maoists, army bullets, naked mothers and Irom Sharmila. The playwright avoids such clichés and, through the narratives of women who run a market in Imphal called Ema Keithel, draws attention to the history of her troubled state. The four teenagers on stage who ask questions classroom-lesson-fashion represent various social groups at different points in the play: the ignorant audience, a bunch of outsiders documenting the oral histories of the local people, and the new urban generation that doesn't care for the past and lives entirely in the present.
There is a problem with history lessons, though. In the hands of the wrong teacher they can be tedious. Why does the director/playwright choose to make her lead actors read out (or pretend to) long sections of text for a good half hour or more? And make the schoolchildren look conspicuously bored out of their wits for the entire length of the play? And, to cap it all, make them move about continuously? This is hugely distracting. Not only does the spectator, who has at most two eyes, find it difficult to take in seven things at a time, but the restlessness on stage also infects her. Occasional, relevant movements to break an actor's monologue can be justified: for instance, when Lakshmi Krishnamurty, who convincingly plays the confused old vendor living in the past, talks of the changes she resents, the schoolchildren keep blocking her path while she speaks of how crowded her town has become. If showing uninterested school kids is pressing the point, so is the academician's (played by Vijay Nair) reading out an entire jargon-packed thesis on women's empowerment. The irony is lost after a few minutes although Nair attempts to bring in light relief through his periodic ear-and-throat-clearing noises. Half way through, when the play snapped out of recital mode into actual theatre with Nair enacting an event, the energy level rose; it peaked with the subsequent narratives of the two younger vendors, particularly those of Anu H.R.
All told, this is a political play that deals with authority and repression. It begins with a (Manipuri) nonsense verse “Te-te tena-wa” set to the tune of “Jana Gana Mana”, which degenerates into a cacophonic shouting that clearly symbolises disturbance and conflict. The powerful stories of women whose sons have disappeared — either killed by the state or recruited by militants — are not specific to any state or even country. Vendors relocated from an old market into a new one, teenagers with money to burn… the playwright has constantly tried to generalise human experience.
Before the play began the audience was invited to walk on stage and examine an ‘installation'. This consisted of some strong portrait shots and backlit images of presumably Ema Keithel and its women vendors (taken by Deepika Arwind), all the props in the play (including a teapot and glucose biscuits), and a silent, looped video showing a woman in the grip of either extreme grief or possession. If this was meant to draw us into the atmosphere of the play it didn't work. Had the photos been strung up along the last landing leading to the auditorium entrance, one could have lingered over them on the way in. Ambient sounds recorded in the market played through speakers would have captured the mood.
Thounaojam seems to have a penchant for catchy but mystifying titles. This one is a reference to an essay by David Foster Wallace (this uber-cool po-mo dead dude who is suddenly all the rage) in which he countered the belief that the lobster feels no pain when dunked in boiling water. Lucky lobster if feels no pain. Hmm. That requires quite a stretch of the imagination.
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