Theatre Marina’s Anniyal , staged in Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, is a Tamil adaptation (direction Giridharan) of Girish Karnad’s play Odakalu Bimba (Broken Images). Anniyal shows how the images of ourselves, which we present for public consumption, are carefully crafted, and not a true representation of who we are. But these images are fragile and can be broken when the still small voice in us becomes active, as happens to Anjali in Anniyal .
The play had just one actor — Latha Venkat — playing the role of Anjali, a successful author of a novel in English. The snobbery of the intellectual class, which disdains books in the vernacular, but laps up books in English is exposed. Anjali, who has to her credit a book of Tamil short stories, says that a writer in Tamil is paid so poorly that she cannot make even sambar with the money.
But, for her English story, the publishers have paid her such a hefty advance, that she has resigned her job as a lecturer. However, Anjali is not the author of the novel. She has stolen her dead invalid sister Aarti’s story and passed it off as her own.
The play begins with a smug Anjali answering the questions of her readers in a television programme. She lies blithely, shedding tears over Aarti’s plight and boasts of her own linguistic skills. Theatre Marina’s Anniyal staged at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Mylapore.
| Photo Credit:SRINATH M But when the TV programme ends, she imagines that there is an image of Aarti on the screen. Every excuse s.