Mercy..

Mercy – that was the name of the play staged by the Madras Players that I went to on Friday. It was my first taste of solo theater and it was pretty impressive. The theme explored in the play was Euthanasia and its ethical aspects. The man on the center stage is a publisher, with a background of a happy marriage to a classical artiste, which had lasted thirty years. His wife is injured in an accident and falls into a coma, from which the chances of recovery seem quite slim. The agony of the family is brought to the front quite clearly and also the character of the wife is shown to us through certain memories of conversations where she seems to have a strong opinion that no life is better than a half life. After a massive internal struggle between his instincts and what he believes to be his wife’s sentiments, the man decides to kill her using by an overdose of sleeping pills and this part of the play is very neatly presented by the sequence describing how he would mix the pills in her milk at 9, the feed would be completed by 9.15, the breathing would become laboured at 9.30, she would fall into a deep sleep at 10, and by 11 it would all be over. But he is delayed due to unforeseen circumstances and he gets back home that night to find that she has actually shown signs of regaining consciousness. After this, her recovery is rapid and everyone is happy, except the man, who is guilt ridden. Like Hamlet’s bloody dagger, he sees the whole 9. 9.15, 9.30, 10, 11 sequence replayed in his head and the agony of “what might have been” drives him insane, till he decides to kill himself, and for a good measure of poetic justice, with the same pills he had readied to kill his wife.
This was a very different experience from the plays ive been to so far, because here the focus was not on the subtleties in the script, wit or humour but on the acting and the fair representation of all sides of the theme. It was a pleasure watching that experienced actor, P C Ramakrishna portray the various emotions the protagonist goes through, and generally filling the stage with his presence impressively. But the script was rather threadbare and was ridden with clichéd expressions and phrases.
Have just been presented with a quite preposterous and yet insanely interesting idea, a staging of Pulp Fiction. Though the actual adaptation of the movie to the stage might be a dream, it is still fun to think of who would fit the roles of those characters in the theater version.