Jazz – A play by Ramu Ramanathan

December 3rd 2007, Museum Theatre, Chennai


December in Chennai has its own quota of festivals – the main music and dance festival held by different sabhas; Every year a new festival crops up, ostentatiously to encourage the new and experimental in the fields of music and dance. This year the new entrant has been the Parks New Festival. It is initiated by Prakriti Foundation and Ranvir Shah, its active Director. He was a part of the Other Festival which was on till last year. Rumour has it that The Other Festival bowed out having lived its life and purpose and the New Festival took its place. Well, the artistic community of Chennai, as elsewhere, is used to all these Old wine in new bottle tactics and self propagating antics through new names and face lifts done by festival organizers. So, it is not with much hope or expectation that I went to see the play “Jazz” written by Ramu Ramanathan and enacted by a Bombay group, Stagesmith.

But, I was taken aback, nay stunned, by the artistic and dramatic qualities of the play. It was the minimalistic stage with a few props such as an antique chair and a table and a few jass musical instruments such as a saxophone, a trumpet and a clarinet placed in an upright position, along with two antique candle stands that greeted me and attracted my attention to begin with. Next, the announcement that the play would have only two actors caught my attention. The two characters were an old jazz musician in the last laps of his life and a young aspirant who comes to him to learn the subtleties of jazz music. Once again, minimalism, I thought. But, when Bugs Bhargava Krishna entered the stage and began his act through a bout of singing and dancing the stage was transformed. There was an electrical energy flowing through. He meandered through his life – past, present and even his own end. He related it to the boy who came to him as a pure novice – dewy eyed, in awe of the legendary musician. As he started his story the other actors also made their appearances through video clippings interspersed with the live acting in a seamless way. So, the stage became full, not through presences, but through absences represented on screen. The quality of the black and white close-ups as video or film clippings was awesome. There were no technical glitches or interruptions in the flow of the play. When the musician acted his own death, the candles on the candlestands were lit from behind the curtains using long poles. The priest in the video clippings intoned the consecrational speech and splashed holy water from the screen. It added to the eerie quality of the scene. The shape of the coffin was marked by a light design on the floor. So, the actor lived and died without effort taking the viewers through a saga of a musicians life. In the organiser’s words “Slipping in slivers of Dixieland stamp, Portuguese Fados, Ellingtonesque doodles, cha cha cha, Mozart and Bach themes. There’s egos, failed futures, alcoholism; there’s love, passion, bounced cheques; there’s showbiz, razzmatazz and some of the biggest names in popular culture from C. Ramachandra to Laxmikant Pyarelal to Sankar Jaikishan to R.D. Burman.” The context was the influence of Goan Jazz bands on early Bollywood music composers and the tunes they made. But the content was the pathos of an artist’s life, especially the evening of his life. The glory and the glitz have all faded; there’s only the lingering memory, the ephemeral phantoms of musical highs achieved. The whole effort was very moving and strangely it had a Guru Dutt film quality, the inevitable tragedy that overtakes the artist who lives a life of excess or self destruction.

But, the biggest surprise was the boy who played the saxophone – Rhys D’souza. The sounds of his sax were so good that I thought it was a recording played from the back, the boy just imitating the movements with his mouth and fingers. I am sure he would be insulted by this comment; but, I mean it as a compliment; except in a recording how can you achieve this kind of perfection of rhythm and melody? The naivete and young enthusiasm of the boy to learn music from a legend was also brought out well. The next surprise was the video interludes. Those actors in the video came alive and they were as much a part of the show even though they were not present physically on stage. What a perfect blending of two forms – video and theatre! The last, but not least aspect of the play that held me spellbound was the script. The musician spoke in songs and all the songs were composed by the scriptwriter. For a theatre scriptwriter to extend himself and write songs that go well with the theme of the play is not an easy task. But Ramu has achieved it to perfection. In spite of the patina of pathos in the play there was humour too in the words, at times risqué, most of the times as quick repartees and satirical comments. Those were the high points of the play, the script and the songs, the sound of the saxophone, the inimitable acting of the protagonist, the minimalist settings, the blending of the video clippings with the main script, the quality of the video clippings and the overall pathos underlying the whole play. But, I realize that when I see a play of this calibre, I cannot recapture all that I felt in my words; how can I encapsulate that musician or that artist who was a mixture of discipline and indiscipline, irreverence and compassion, dedication to his special form of art which turns into a passion, an obsession and the main reason for living. A creator par excellence who is self destructive, a perfectionist who revels in imperfections, a human being caught between the infinite yearning to soar into unachievable heights and falls down when his wings are clipped by external circumstances. How can I reduce to words the work of a director who managed to combine impossible elements into a coherent whole and infused inexplicable emotions into it. How can I explain the haunting quality of the boy who through the sounds of sax showed glimpses of the sublime quality of music and the tragedy of all geniuses. All I can finally say is that I was moved inexplicably by the whole experience. I am convinced that good theatre is still alive.


by VASANTHI SANKARANARAYAN
vasanthi40@gmail.com

The writer is a film historian, art critic, translator AND Nirmala Seshadri's creative collaborator.