Vinay Sharma’s ‘Kirchein’ Depicts A World In Splinters

Vinay Sharma, actor-director associated with Rikh, is forever exploring the very structure of theatre. He deconstructs it, sometimes pushing the audience to question whether the performance they are watching is ‘theatre’ at all, or whether it is ‘non-theatre’, or even ‘anti-theatre’. Sharma’s work can fit itself into one or more than one of these labels depending on the perspective of the viewer.

Sharma has been involved in theatre and with Padatik, the performance centre founded by the late Shyamanand Jalan since 1981. He stepped into direction in 1991.

His recent plays are not quite ‘plays’ in the commonly accepted understanding of the term. They are different. The audience, on first viewing, might respond with shock, surprise, confusion and complete lack of comprehension. But it will not get up and walk away.

This play in particular, has a mesmerising impact on the audience because it breaks all our former experiences of watching a play.

When this writer stepped into the minimalist performance space of Padatik Little Theatre, there were just a few people in the audience. Padatik, within its confined space, is often converted into a flexible and mobile space.

Sometimes, it radically reverses the audience-performance viewing and performing order depending on the play being presented,the directorial preference and the demands on space a given play makes.

‘Kirchein’ (splinters), states its director Vinay Sharma, “continues my ‘theatre in jeans’ series of minimalist plays. They seek to place before practising actors as well as audiences, a wider range of drama texts and dramatic genres with more frequency, than the time required by what big-ticket productions allow.

‘Kirchein’ is futuristic, intriguing and if one may say so, also a bit scary. The play opens on a moving screen showing an open sky with cotton-candy clouds dotting an azure blue sky before the youngsters move in.

There are two groups of youngsters who move in from two opposite sides of the performance space. They are actors from two different, well-known period dramas. One is Dharamvir Bharati’s Hindi play ‘Andha Yug’ and the other is Max Frisch’s ‘The Fire Raisers’.

‘Andha Yug’ by Dharamvir Bharati is a verse-play in Hindi. It is analysed as “a poignant allegory that explores the moral and ethical dilemmas faced by individuals during times of war.

The play is set against the backdrop of the ‘Mahabharata’ and highlights the devastating consequences of war and violence. The characters in the play are forced to grapple with difficult decisions and moral dilemmas, which serve to highlight the human cost of war.”

It is said to be a metaphoric meditation on the politics of violence and aggressive selfhood and that war dehumanised individuals and society. Thus both the victor and the vanquished lose eventually.

‘The Fire Raisers’, was written by the Swiss novelist and playwright Max Frisch in 1953, first as a radio play, then adapted for television and the stage (1958) as a play in six scenes. It was revised in 1960 to include an epilogue.

This dark comedy is set in a town that is regularly attacked by arsonists. Disguised as door-to-door salesmen (hawkers), they talk their way into people's homes and settle down in the attic, where they set about planning the destruction of the house.

How do these two plays fit into the larger context of the actual play ‘Kirchein’ or, as translated in English, splinters?

Is the world today already in splinters, that perhaps, finds reality within the context of the play itself exemplified in the large, live screen in the backdrop sometimes depicting the horrors of war?

Or, are the actors trapped in the characters they have been portraying ever since they can remember, finding their identity in splinters as they no longer know who they are and what their purpose of living in this splintered world is?

Kirchein has little to do with these two plays, the two groups of actors drawn from two different plays. But these two classics, one in Hindi and the other in Swiss translated into many world languages, only throw up the context in which the actors are placed.

The stage for these groups of actors is the prop they are given as they cannot perform without reference to the context of the plays, maybe only through their titles. The bell in the hand of the individual characters is a metaphor for the third bell they are all used to and cannot talk without the bell.

The next actor takes the cue from the one who has just finished, takes his/her seat and begins to talk.

The actors dressed in black tees and blue jeans appear confused, puzzled and questioning themselves about their lives and their identity and the purpose of their very act of living and acting. The screen at the back of the performing space has disappeared and the space has now its natural, black background with a bench, a chair and so on dotting the space here and there.

The problem is that both groups, young and once filled with enthusiasm, energy and dreams, are now very unhappy as they find themselves completely trapped within the characters they have been playing in the two plays since they can remember.

It is as if their faces, their bodies, their body language, their speech, their speech patterns are caged within the characters they have been portraying since they can remember.

“All I can speak are the dialogues that are my everyday vocabulary” a female actor says, despairing of the trap she cannot get out of. “Who am I, really?” asks another actor, of himself, not knowing the answer and depressed by his failure to use normal speech.

For him, being “normal” stands for the dialogue he has been delivering day after day, night after night, without pause, till one day, he realises that he does not have an identity of his own.

One by one, each character comes and sits on a chair to narrate his/her inner pain and experience till the bell they are holding in one hand rings and the person leaves to make space for the next one.

The actors, all of them very young, fill the performance with the electric energy, their physical mobility and flexibility and bring out the pain of their missing identities broken into fragments like broken pieces of a once-complete mirror.

Though the core theme of the play remains the same according to Vinay Sharma, the performances, it appears from Sharma’s note, are entirely flexible leaving the trained actors to enact the characters in the way they feel fit in each successive performance.

Thank you Vinay Sharma, and the performing group including the technical team, the music, the video clips and last but never the least, for giving us the space to watch this play, or non-play or anti-play or whatever you may wish to call it.