The Perfect Solution

We have this history of doing plays that only a small fraction of the college gets. Noel Coward, Neil Simon, G. B. Shaw... In my second sem we did Arthur Miller's All My Sons. It's still one of my favourite plays, but very few people appreciated it's complexity and what it was trying to say. Our attitude to picking plays was that the classics were... classic. You couldn't go wrong that way.

A couple of years ago, when I was a lowly first year, a final year wrote a play. He wrote three actually. One was an adaptation of Stephen King's Apt Pupil. Another, Playing Along was this absolute farce, a plotless collection of lewd jokes with a 'theatre devil' making an appearance every now and then, commenting on the point of theatre. The audience (consisting mostly of culture starved engineers) loved the jokes, the judges loved the devil and Playing Along was, and still is actually, our Award Winning Play. And that was as far as redefining theatre in our college went. (Let's not talk about the third.)

We had one year under an unimaginative Presi. Barefoot in the Park which was booed so badly I never wanted to get on stage again and one of the most boring plays I've ever seen or heard of, Scales of Justice. Then Shekar became Presi. He was as tired as the rest of us of the vast majority of college labelling our plays boring. Extremely well done, but boring. So he decided to give the audience exactly what they wanted. We did The Murder of Shekar Krishnan, a whodunit, more in the Wodehouse than Christie style. Bungling detective and all. We gave the detective a mallu accent, the secretary dipsomania and threw in a few risque lines. And the audience loved it. After a three year drought, we finally had a success.

There were a few people though, who came to us feeling betrayed. You've sold out, they said. Your standards have fallen. This isn't what theatre is about.

And so we thought long and hard before picking our next play. We wanted something that was intelligent without being heavy. Something entertaining, but not frivolous. And most importantly, we wanted to do something different.

When Shekar picked Final Solutions, I have to admit I had qualms about doing it. Didn't think it was doable, really. Didn't think we had the time, the resources, even the talent to do something on that scale. And yet, surprisingly, everything worked out. We had an almost perfect cast. The sets, the props, the lights were more than I'de even let myself hope for. And the music, just a tabla and a flute, was hauntingly beautiful. Apart from a few technical glitches, that production was perfect.

It's strange though, that after all that, I find myself wishing things had been different. Final Solutions is one of the best plays I've ever worked on, and I hate saying this, but I had one of the worst times working on it. Our little theatre group fractured into so many little factions, each one bitching about the other. There were other factors that catalysed this change. It wasn't Final Solutions. But in my head, both are inextricably intertwined. And I'll always think that maybe, it wasn't the perfect solution.