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On 7th January 2008, the National School of Drama’s (NSD) satellite festival presented DELIRIUM at the Nehru Centre, Mumbai. Produced by Plasma, a theatre company from Zurich in Switzerland, the play proved to be a novel experience. The supertitles helped one appreciate the play better but they could have been handled more adeptly to explain the action taking place on the stage.
The play has been directed by Lukas Bangerter. And while there is hardly any perceptible script, the play deals with the mind and the whole universe within; bizarre, secretive, unreal, guilt-ridden with its constantly jabbering voices and moving bodies in strange contours. But somehow this strange world on stage looked far more real than reality itself!
The cast of seven people- five actors and two musicians are at a bar, which seems endless. They appear as being enslaved to their own little worlds. They mechanically go through their motions on the stage. At a deeper level they come across as being unaware of the presence of others. They are mentally free therefore to indulge in all the uncommon acts like undressing in front of others, behaving like being of opposite sex, indulging in sexual fantasies, dancing naked and indulging in bizarre sexual activities.
Out of two female musicians, one of them is an actress-singer and danseuse who while dancing with her partner, assumes whacky postures out of boredom to perform the same routine. The play is more aptly described in the playwright-director’s words: ‘Delirium is inspired by the troupe’s own experiences of the Finnish winter during their tour to Helsinki. The endless night shifts perception, slowly dissolving the borders between the fantasized, the remembered and the experienced, heightened and underscored by the tonal contrast of Bangerter’s lyrics, Jan Ratschko’s Hammond organ and Martin Wigger’s electronic sounds.’
In sum the play is a performance of frenzied activities. The set with its endless bar in a dark dungeon-like place has an erratic digital clock ticking away along the side surface of the circular bar table. In spite of all the frantic movements on the stage there was a palpable counter stillness as if time had stopped. The light design was in line with the mood of the play; half lit, half covered in darkness and yet revealing of the inexplicable human behaviour. Sound too played a very important role in this production. The costumes were dark and gray in tone except when the actors metamorphed mentally into different people.
The actors were excellent by themselves and as a group too. The very idea of the real/unreal was conveyed just by the superb and meticulous acting. It would have been easy for the actors to be more emotional but their distant approach was what clinched this journey through inner worlds- lonely, dark, irrational and unemotional as they can be.
*The writer is a senior theatre and television person who has trained under Ebrahim Alkazi at the National School of Drama (NSD). She has written for publications such as ‘The Asian Age’ and is a regular contributor to the Prithvi Theatre Newsletter (PT Notes). She also offers theatre training to students at the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan and is an important critical voice for the Gujarati Theatre.
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