Actor and theatre director R Amarendran will tell you, with complete sincerity, that acting is no more complicated than carpentry. Pick up the saw, go up and down. Learn the lines, walk on stage, and mean what you say. He has been telling people this since the 1990s. Most of them don’t believe him. He puts them on stage anyway.
He trained in France on Sartre and Genet, staged absurdist philosophy in a second language, and watched the audience slowly stop coming. So he changed. Not his standards, never those, but everything else.
This weekend, Theatre Arlequin and Alliance Française de Madras present Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, an evening of six short plays. The content, which the director is quite upfront about, is firmly 18+.
Four of the six, Tango of Love, Best Daddy, The Psychos, and The Call, are comedies. Amarendran doesn’t do slapstick, or let his cast milk a laugh and run with it. “What we rehearse is what we present,” he says. The remaining two, Notes in the Margin and Daddy is Home, are serious.
“The biggest challenge,” he admits, “is the homogenisation of talent. Some are absolute beginners, some are experienced. I have to level out their skills.” That tension, between the raw and the rehearsed, is often where the most interesting theatre lives.
He is chasing something harder to manufacture: the particular lightness of an audience that has, for 90 minutes, forgotten what they came in carrying. “I hope they walk away with a smile on their faces and a bounce in their steps,” he says. “I hope they forget their worries in the time they spend watching my plays.”
Entry free. On May 23, at 7.30 pm. At Alliance Française de Madras, Nungambakkam.
Email: shivani@newindianexpress.com
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