The Devil’s Own

Audiences at another Sivaraman play,Spinal Cord,carried back haunting images of an 80-year-old woman wandering on a dark stage dragging a puppet and jabbering about her murdered son. The play had picked up seven honours at the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards 2010,including the Best Stage Design Award. “I don’t work on scripts,I work on scenography,images that bring a play to life,” says Sivaraman. A Charles Wallace scholar,he teaches at Wimbledon College of Arts in the UK,and is working on a research project titled “Spatial Identities and Visual Language in Theatre”.

Sivaraman laughs off his fixation with the gory and the ghastly,but an old memory stirs to life: “When I was young,I had a job of painting the names of dead people on graves. I quite enjoyed it.”

Peer Gynt was a commissioned project for the Ibsen festival by the Norwegian Embassy and Delhi-based arts organisation DADA,but the play,among Ibsen’s most complex and fantastical,seemed tailor-made for Sivaraman. “My play starts where Ibsen’s ends,with Gynt’s death. Gynt asks God to give him another chance to be a better man. The Devil,however,is convinced that an evil man will never change,” he says.

The story of Gynt’s life becomes a platform for the director’s political commentary — Gynt becomes an NRI businessman involved in mining and arms deals. “All along,the Devil walks with him,” says Sivaraman,explaining that the story explores the universal tussle of good and evil. The Devil,in this play,dresses slick and lives a relaxed,happy life. God,on the other hand,is a stressed-out insomniac,who worries about growing evil. One of the latter’s pastimes is to collect the hearts of dead men so that he can study how they turned evil. “Theatre should challenge and provoke. I have a political statement to make,that’s why I am a theatre director else I would have been a chef,” states the director.

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