A tragic encounter at Majestic bus stand forced city playwright Swar Thounaojam to bring on stage the English play Fake Palindromes

It all started for the city-based and a Manipuri by birth playwright Swar Thounaojam in early 2010, when one day she and her friend were discussing a news article on the death of an English boy at the Majestic bus stand.
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A few days later,u00a0 Thounaojam decided to put the same conversation on paper and thus Majestic a short theatre piece was born. For the last one year, Thounaojam has written more such short pieces and compiling all of them together this week she brings on stage the English play Fake Palindromes.

A collection of seven pieces of theatre including Majestic, the play is about accidental death, sexual harassment, Iris technology (a method of biometric analysis), Bhopal Gas tragedy, racism in India, concert goers who hardly appreciate the show and clueless and random diners.

Sharing that the play is also named after her favourite song by the same name by the American musician Andrew Bird, writer and director, Swar Thounaojam confesses, "My friend and I said some strange things to each other.

As is the nature of memory, I couldn't recollect what exactly we said. I was trying to create a palindrome of our conversation but I couldn't make it happen. Majestic was like a fake palindrome of our conversation on page."

In simple terms, a palindrome refers to a word that reads the same backward as forward. Fake Palindromes will have two male actors and one female actor play around 21 characters in 90 minutes. According to Thounaojam, all these characters are arrogant and estranged, exploring the intense world of action, conflict and closure.

On the stage under harsh lights, you will get to see the life of an American musical genius in Germany, the fate of the poor people in a posh London restaurant and so on.

Thounaojam terms the play as unapologetically urban as it is a dialogue that shows how people in big cities sometimes talk, interrupting each other and pin-prick other people's cheerful theories of life. To bring out the insensitive effect, instead of using stage lights Thounaojam will illuminate the space with house lights.

Revealing that her favourite piece is the coda (the closing section of an act) where three actors dance for three minutes, Thounaojam says, "I don't have any message but the relevance of the play lies in the way the characters respond to each other in all the pieces: their arrogance and estrangement are craftily laced with wry humour because they don't want to end up on the streets, boxing each other out."

At Ranga Shankara, JP Nagar
On January 5 and 6, 7.30 pm
Call 96325 06195
For Rs 100