‘A Death In An Antique Shop’: Challenge To Our Cognitive Capacity?

Asoka Handagama is notorious for challenging our cognitive capacity through his artwork, be it through poetry, fiction, stage drama, teledrama, or movies. His newest stage drama, ‘A Death in an Antique Shop’, is the best, or worst in some sense, in this tradition. You can watch it not on stage but on YouTube.

In many respects, watching the drama on YouTube is better than doing it in a theatre-environment. First, it is free from the attention deficiency which we will face in a theatre. As Salman Khan, creator of the Khan Academy, has told us in his autobiographical professional experience, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined, we can keep attention to a single object continuously not more than for about seven minutes; beyond that, we lose focus on the object.

In a theatre where we sit for hours in an uncomfortable posture, it is certainly not possible to pay full attention to what is being unfolded on the stage for the whole duration of the drama. Second, with its class preferences, front-seaters in a theatre get a better view of the drama and could listen to the dialogue more clearly compared to mid-seaters and back-seaters. Hence, though all are in the same auditorium, some are better served than others.

Thus, it is not inclusive but exclusive. Third, in a theatre, if we lose some dialogue, we cannot play back and listen to it again whereas we can do it on YouTube. Fourth, the negative externality exerted by fellow viewers in the auditorium like noisy laughter.