A stale marriage and an adultery that never happens

KOCHI: Sarah lights a cigarette and takes a puff while she continues conversing with Richard' that's a line from Harold Pinter's script for The Lover. Santhy Balachandran, playing Sarah, effortlessly enacts the poise of an English woman habituated to smoking in the chill of a winter evening.
Little does the audience know that Santhy is an amateur when it comes to even holding a cig as she is to theatre.“I had to practise with herbal cigarettes consistently to look the least clumsy while carrying out the act. On stage, I had to smoke the regular ones for the sake of authenticity and it made me nauseous this over the stage-fear of a debut performance,“ says Santhy , a student of PhD in visual anthropology at Oxford.
The Lover, directed by Sanal Aman, who plays the protagonist Richard in the play , was performed at Panampilly Nagar, Kochi for a week, the debut project of Forplay productions.“We plan to bring the works of playwrights of any language that are relevant to the nuances of the laymen irrespective of their geographical or cultural background. The Lover is one such drama where the emotions at play are universally relatable,“ explains Sanal.
The play turns out to be something that disturbs and is relatable to the audience at the same time. The Lover tells the tale of a couple's marriage, the long years blunting mu tual interest and the allure of extramarital liaisons to pep up the relationship. It has a screenplay that demands physical proximity and chemistry, a woman voicing her right to emotional and sexual gratification with or without her husband ­ things the Malayali audience usually treats with a grimace in public.
Was that a concern? Apparently not, says Santhy. “Because as the play comes to an end, it becomes clear to the audience that there was never a third person, but just the husband and wife role-playing to spice-up things a little bit,“ she says.
The climax, which caters to the sanctimonious impulse of the audience, however, keeps them on the edge of their chairs throughout the play. This is precisely why cine artist Surjith, the `Aadu Aboottykka' of the movie Charlie decided to mentor and invest in the endeavor a couple of youngsters instigated. “People need to connect to what they are made to see and that is the most revolutionary spark that I see with Forplay. The plans they have are not for recreating the olden `dying art form', but to craft fresh and dynamic scripts that masses can connect to,“ Surjith says.