Sunil Kumar S taps into the power of repetition in his intimate theatre production, Maze | Lifestyle News, The Indian Express

Sunil Kumar S taps into the power of repetition in his intimate theatre production, Maze | Lifestyle News, The Indian Express

Written by Dipanita Nath |Updated: March 7, 2019 8:24:52 am

Sunil Kumar S taps into the power of repetition in his intimate theatre production, Maze

Staged as part of the Bharat Rang Mahotsav (BRM), the annual theatre festival organised by the National School of Drama in Delhi, Maze held the audience in its grip.

Scenes from Maze

The first sign that Sunil Kumar S was staging a powerful play came from the people who queued outside the auditorium. Senior actors, veterans of the stage and teachers were present in large numbers. Many would be turned away, since Kumar had designed Maze as an intimate performance. “Otherwise it would not get communicated,” says the 23-year-old student of the Theatre Department of Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit (SSUS), Kerala.

Staged as part of the Bharat Rang Mahotsav (BRM), the annual theatre festival organised by the National School of Drama in Delhi, Maze held the audience in its grip. They were seated on stage, around the performance space, watching an able-bodied young man caring for a dying old man. No word was spoken, but the characters communicated through repeated
cycles of physical action.

The servant’s work is to prepare food, clean the old man in the toilet and serve him. To feed the master, the servant would dress in the clothes of the former’s wife, and this would excite the old man’s passion. For the
75-minute duration, the rituals of the house played out in a loop. The effect was of intensity and stillness, unbroken even when the last moments brought a surprise.

“We wanted to explore the repetitive aspect of human life because there is no beginning or end to what we call life. We consider death as the full stop but the dead continue to live within the minds of the living. Memory and reality can’t be separated and they always give rise to the question, what is real?” says Kumar.

He had started out to show how movements of bodies could do the work of dialogues, and was helped by the cast belonging to the same university. They lived together, performed together and tightened the production. “A lot of actions have been improvised by the actors Midhun MP and Rakesh P,” says Kumar.

In his personal choices, Kumar has broken a pattern. A commerce graduate, he would have joined an office except that he gave in to his love for theatre. At SSUS, he has participated actively in every aspect of theatre and worked with student productions as well as with important directors in Kerala. The importance of Maze, his first production, being selected for BRM isn’t lost on Kumar. “Now, I am planning more new works,” he says.