Swami and His Friends - Not a fun group!

Last night, I woke up from hibernation to watch Swami and His Friends by the Madras Players doing its round in Bangalore as part of the Hindu Theatre Fest. It is amazing what publicity and 'build-up' can do to a play. People come walking to a production thinking that it is great and each play then has an opportunity to be greater! I walked in along with this group with all my expectations already met. RK Narayan, Madras Players and the lovable Swami...Tell me what can go wrong?

As it turned out quite a lot! One cannot fault the performance yesterday. It was good over all. There was one shoddy performance (a small role). Hence it did not matter. There was this thing about shouting vs throwing the voice which Swami forgot in a few scenes. He shouted his way is a few places. Not a big deal!

What could not be ignored was the writing and characterization. Swami as I remembered him is this endearing, innocent boy. What I got was a dork! Rajam was this show-off boy, and I got a smart rich kid! The time it took in between stories was too long and the Ganjira was irritating beyond a point. Layering and texture that was possible through story telling, set design and music was reduced to one single layer. There is always a time during performance when you know whether the audience is with you or not. Even with the hugely partisan (and what seemed like friends and family college type) audience, around 55 - 60 min in the play, the audience was getting edgy. To me that is always a measure of the tightness of the script and the story telling. Think about it, not one incident of Swami's young life remains in my mind after one night's sleep. That is not being fair to Malgudi, Swami or Mr. Narayan!

I hope the young director and script writer do take a look at the production and find ways of getting the innocence back in Swami.