Madras Players bring Sujatha’s Adimaigal to the stage this month

You won’t find a hero in this play or a villain either, and theatre veteran PC Ramakrishna who is directing Slaves, says that’s exactly why he wanted it.

Slaves of money, circumstance and self

“There are no black and white characters in the play,” he says adding, “Everyone has a shade of grey.” For him, that’s a gift. Cardboard people give you nothing to work with, whereas characters who each “carry baggage” send the actors digging for it. The Madras Players premiere it in Chennai this month. It’s in English, adapted from Adimaigal, a Tamil play by Sujatha, the pen name of S Rangarajan and translated by Ramakrishna.

If you know Sujatha at all, it’s probably for the science fiction and the suspense. Ramakrishna did too. He’d been reading him for years and enjoyed the stories without once thinking of the stage. Then he found out Sujatha had written nine full-length plays. “I was straightaway inspired by his sense of the dramatic,” he says. Adimaigal even has the author spelling out lighting and how flashbacks should work, which tells you somebody was writing with a theatre in his head.

The setting is a tea estate in the south in 1978. Ramanathan owns it. His nephews Sundaram, Saminathan, Sekhar, and Kalyanaraman all work for him in different roles, and he has reduced them to something close to servants. What holds them in place is the hope of inheriting the property. The arrival of a young woman sets off a chain reaction, unsettling the family’s carefully maintained order.

“Everyone is a slave of one kind or another in the play, to money, to circumstance or to themselves. In real life, as we all are,” he says. That is why, although the story is set in 1978, audiences can still see much of themselves in it in 2026.

Ramakrishna never met Sujatha, though he says he was “intimately acquainted” with the writing. If the author wandered into rehearsal, he’d ask one thing: are the characters the way you pictured them? Good writers are generous, he figures, and would happily watch interpretations they never thought of. “Shakespeare did,” he says. “It has been 500 years, and he still lives on through scores of interpretations.”

Rs 120 onwards. On October 24, at 6.30 pm. At Narada Gana Sabha, Teynampet.

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