Is it a fantasy? Is it a a comedy? As you constantly try to reach a conclusion, you find yourself oscillating between the two genres before it merges into one to present a fantasy play, which is hilarious to the hilt. The Script Whisperer’s Secret revolves around a whisperer who has lived from time immemorial polishing scripts of Homer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Bernard Shaw, Wodehouse, Rowling, Chaplin, Hitchcock, Satyajit Ray, Benegal, Spielberg and many more!
How does one do that, you ask? This play by Thespian En, a 30-year-old Chennai-based theatre group, which is written by Harry Maclure and directed by Ajit Chitturi, answers it for you. The plot revolves around a young and upcoming screenwriter who comes to the Whisperer to doctor his work. At the same time, a prolific award-winning film scriptwriter whose work is in progress with the Whisperer, enters scene. The two works get inter-mingled and characters from both the scripts come to life on stage in utter pandemonium. And when the two sets of characters start interacting, there is utter chaos!
“The Script Whisperer’s Secret is a hilarious comedy which needed a bit of wild imagination from the writer, Harry Maclure’s mind. Two wild scripts are presented to the Whisperer for expunging their maladies and to be made presentable or saleable. The Script doctor, the only one in the world, has been at it since time immemorable — he has even doctored the Iliad, Shakespeare’s works and more in the past. But this time, characters from the two scripts, one a murder mystery and another a supernatural thriller, jump out, intermingle and form chaotic stories of their own,” director Ajit tells us.
Talking about combining fantasy and comedy into the play and the challenges that came along, Ajit says, “It has been difficult as the script itself has a variety of diverse characters, situations and intellectual history. To fuse these together through the actors ranging from a Brit accented to a local hospital ward boy to a three-in-one (boy, girl and an ageless old man) protagonist would not have been possible without a group of fine actors. The script by itself is structured flawlessly, which has helped in the process to bring the written material to life.”
The story of The Script Whisperer’s Secret came to Harry Maclure, a very well-read writer, publisher and editor while he was thinking of writing a series of comedies. The continuity came to him as the script progressed. Harry says, “In Hollywood, there are script doctors — the guys who take a script and add on or minus something, basically polishing the script which then makes a movie a huge box office success. But unfortunately, they are not mentioned in the credits. So that gave me this idea. And to make it cryptic, I call the character Script Whisperer. While writing this script, it became a blend of fantasy and comedy, eventually turning into a farce.”
Incorporated references to Homer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and the likes must have been difficult too, we ask, and Ajit says, “That’s from the writer’s imagination. Ours is a fictitious character and fantasy has no limits on imagination.”
Rs 300 onwards.
Tickets available online.
July 8, 7.30 pm & July 9, 7 pm.
Alliance Française of Madras.
rupam@newindianexpress.com
@rupsjain
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