Can a man be frightening without looking the part? Could he even seem perfectly ordinary? In Thespian en’s Necks and Glasses, playwright Harry MacLure wants to see how long an audience can sit with that discomfort. His Chennai-set monologue follows a serial killer’s mind, moving between the ordinary and the horrific without offering viewers the reassurance of a neat explanation. “The spark was purely theatrical,” Harry says. “I wanted to see if a single actor, using nothing but his voice and words, could make an audience in Chennai feel terrified, conflicted, and completely captivated.”
The city is not merely a backdrop. Harry describes Chennai as “a city of closed doors and deep-seated domestic discretion”, where public propriety can coexist with private anxieties. He wanted the thriller to inhabit the space between the two. Its protagonist, he says, is not the familiar “Evil Genius” mastermind of popular screen portrayals, but a man driven by compulsion and internal fantasy.
For actor Ajit Chitturi, getting inside this man’s head meant beginning much earlier, with the child he once was. “Playing that part is the beginning to what follows very easily later as he grows up,” he says. The childhood scenes, the character’s attempts to explain himself, and his fixation on girls wearing glasses became important points of entry.
Yet Ajit was conscious of the danger of making a violent character too compelling. The script took months to prepare for performance, and he made a point of stepping away from the role during rehearsals. Harry’s writing helped, he says, because it moves “back and forth, almost non-linear, alternating between the killer and his humane side.” That structure prevented him from dealing with the character’s darkness alone.
Neither man is interested in reproducing the familiar screen version of a serial killer. Ajit is emphatic about avoiding imitation. “Any actor who believes in originality resists conventions,” he says. His approach is to build the role from the text and rehearsals.
The title itself hints at the unsettling details through which the mind of the protagonist operates. Harry describes Necks and Glasses as a meeting of “the hyper-physical with the deeply psychological”, with the objects embodying a tension between vulnerability and perception. The horror, however, lies less in the objects themselves than in the logic the protagonist builds around them. “I wanted the audience to sit inside the mind of someone who weaponises these exact power dynamics,” Harry says, referring to the ways entitlement and unchecked impulses can escalate into violence. Rather than turn the play into a moral lecture, he wanted to show how such impulses can develop when left unchallenged.
For Ajit, the challenge was to make these contradictions believable without allowing the character’s vulnerability to soften the horror of his actions. The script’s shifts between the ordinary and the grotesque were particularly striking. One moment, the character is recounting an apparently normal experience; the next, he is describing his killings in detail. Among the scenes that helped Ajit understand him were the childhood episodes and his attempts to explain his own behaviour. Then there is the fixation itself: “his obsession of girls wearing glasses and the feel of his fingers on the victim’s necks,” as Ajit puts it. The specificity makes the character all the more disturbing.
Harry believes the live format intensifies this discomfort in ways that screen portrayals cannot. “In cinema, the camera is an editor of reality,” he says. “Theatre removes that safety net.” With no cuts to interrupt the performance, the actor’s physical presence becomes part of the tension, leaving the audience to confront the character in real time.
The live performance brings its own demands. Ajit had to return to the basics he teaches his students, from breathing and diction to stamina, to sustain an intense solo performance for over an hour. For Harry, the theatre’s particular power lies in its proximity. An audience cannot retreat into the safety of a screen. The actor’s breathing and sweat occupy the same air.
Ajit, meanwhile, questions the way popular storytelling often presents dark characters in “unemotional and totally black tones without the question: WHY?” Asking why is not the same as excusing what happened. But the distinction can be harder to maintain when the person explaining himself is standing just a few feet away.
Ultimately, Harry hopes the play unsettles the audience beyond the theatre doors. “Where does the performance end and the person begin?” is the question he wants them to carry into the Chennai night. There is no tidy diagnosis waiting at the end, only the possibility that cruelty may be closer to the ordinary than we would like to believe.
Rs 300 onwards. On November 1 at 6.30 pm. At Alliance Française de Madras, Nungambakkam.
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