Theatrics through Poignance
Every emotion, no matter how insignificant, finds space in some art form or the other. Then why is love – in any form such an indispensable part of art ?
Shaswati Das
13.11.2009
From the Editor
We often wonder what true theatrics is. Is it the hullabaloo of the theatre, the brilliance, the music, the properties and the histrionics? Or is it the simplicity with which the audience is left enraptured? That may amount to a subjective question of sorts.
‘Tumhari Amrita.’ Through the simplest of set-ups and lighting and the most complex of emotions, Shabana Azmi and Farooq Sheikh traversed a thirty five year journey marked by love, pain, happiness, wonder and tragedy; their simple and tangible emotions spread out across hundreds of letters that they may have written to each other in these years.
Of course, it was sheer romance told through Urdu phrases, which flowed like poetry and facial expressions. Nonetheless, it didn’t fail to astound the audience as far as depth of emotions was concerned. Does a relationship of this kind exist? Or is it lost in the myriad sounds of the metropolitan?
A similar emotion took over the sensibilities of two eight year old boys somewhere in strife-torn Auschwitz, Poland. Yet the emotion takes on connotations of undying love between two friends – one German, the other Jewish. It is the German child who risks all to apologise to the other for betraying him – betrayal that had cost the other Jewish friend his freedom. ‘The boy in the striped pyjamas’, a heart-rending tale of love and friendship through the barbed wires of a concentration camp and the gas chambers, that ultimately consume this friendship, strikes the softest chord within all.
It is displayed through books, through music, through theatre, through paintings, though lyrics and poetry, through cinema and through people. It is love, not in the quintessential sense that overpowers most themes that artists work on. It remains the undertone to most works, worldwide. For, through this emotion, artists hold the audience in a trance that no other emotion may invoke. A story revolving around the battlefield or a tragic or a comic setting is ultimately laced with this one feeling that the reader, listener or viewer is in search of.
Perhaps, that is what has been loosely coined “happily ever after.”
Shaswati Das
[ratings]
[image courtesy: http://tinyurl.com/ykzo4zv]
