உள்ளிருந்து நாடகம் Insight A Play

abstract dark comedy
Admission: $ 10.00
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365 778 4739 Sudar

Ullirunthu (உள்ளிருந்து) – A review of a play by P.A. Jayakaran
– Nedra Rodrigo-

Jayakaran’s new play is about the human conscience. That is easily said, but it is not as easily recounted how conscience is at play here. The play opens with a simple domestic scene. A cat sits curled up on a couch, undisturbed by the scratching sounds that grow louder and more ominous. The owner of the home, the ‘master,’ enters and berates the cat for not doing his job and killing the rats. The familiar scene is defamiliarized when the cat begins to speak back and asks the master in turn if his love and affection were only conditional on the cat being a murderer.

Drawing from the tradition of epic theatre, where the characters’ everyday problems are a metaphor for greater social ills, the play also involves a talking rat. Both cat and rat are dressed in attire befitting their characters: the lazy homebody cat in soft pyjamas and the urbane, streetwise rat in a sharp suit. A game of cat and mouse begins, but it is the rat taunting the cat, and then later the man. Or is it the man luring both cat and rat into his trap? The play takes us through some twists and turns before the rat reveals a secret he knows about the man. The man is himself a murderer, or very close to one, as he has betrayed an innocent (maybe) young man to the army to save his own skin. He has even provided a bullet.
Is this conversation happening entirely within the man? Coming ‘from within,’ as the title suggests?
Yet the conversation is not directed within, and when the characters occasionally break the fourth wall and implicate the audience, it is further confirmed that the play extends to critique a society where betrayal is domesticated and made mundane.

Kalapooraan Thanga’s dramatic voice and gestures indicate the epic nature of what is about to unravel even before the audience is clued into it by the script. Lankathas Pathmanathan’s cat is lazy, naïve and affectionate (not at all like any cat I’ve met), but his physicality in this role matches his languorous speech. When he switched to violence, and then returns to his lazy, innocent self, it is credible because of the work he does in physically creating the cat. Sudarakan’s rat is stylish and manipulative. Clever even when in peril, and cynical even in friendship. Kandiah was also believable in his short appearance, threatening the menace of rats to come. But it is Thanga in his role as the demanding ‘master’ of the house, who turns into victim and evil perpetrator who is expected to carry the weight of the play, and he does.

It is a clever play, and one that reminds of Brecht’s epic theatre because of the demands it makes on both actors and audience. The play could have benefited from some editing in the first act, where the discourse between cat and master becomes a little repetitive. It could also have benefitted from some skillful lighting that could have given better shape and coherence to the narrative. The lighting got confusing at some points, where I wasn’t sure if the audience was being lit intentionally or not. It would be more effective as a device if that contrast is clearer.

What I am left with afterwards is the question of conscience. Certainly in Brecht’s time the portrayal of social ills had a powerful impact – so much so that Nazis would attempt to disrupt his plays. Today, we seem to live in an age beyond conscience, when children are caged in detention centres and mass killings go unpunished. As one of the characters says, even murderers can get Nobel prizes now. Ullirunthu makes me nostalgic for a time when a conscience meant something.
(June 15, 2019 Yorkwoods Library Theatre)