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Bryan says:
"We have recently returned from a brief sojourn come pilgrimage India where we (the director, co-writer and myself) were invited to meet the author and some of the people that the characters are based on and see the place of the story. The invitation was at the behest of Mary Roy, Arundhati's mother, for her 70th birthday celebration for which a three-day performing arts festival was held. Mary Roy is the celebrated creator of Palakudam, a school that specialises in the teaching of Kathakali and other traditional, as well as contemporary artforms from preschool up, in Kerala, a state in the south of India. The exchange, and the nature of the project itself, was a significant step both culturally and artistically. "
Designer's notes:
Stage Play by Heather Timms and Gillian Clarke
Directed by Heather Timms
Designed by Bryan Woltjen
Intensely visual, extraordinary in its explicit and confronting detail, set in a land of breathtaking beauty, THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS for a designer, is no small thing at all. From the monsoon swept streets and fields of eclectic Southern India, to a modest greasy spoon café in Oxford, UK, with a complex web of eight leading characters and a motley group of periphery characters, it was at once important that the space be simple, evocative, and flexible to cope with quick transitions and large amounts of cast and puppets on stage. The winding river of gauze became for us the life-blood that feeds the visual orientation about the stage, provides a screen for the integration of Arundhati's words, and allows the partial incorporation of a 'black theatre' effect (in negative).
Bitter Aunt Baby Kochamma, her (late) angry brother Pappachi and his noble blind wife Mammachi are all in one way or another guided by the unforgiving shadows and morbid demons of the past. Therefore puppetry became the ideal medium for these characters. Velutha is the victim of that bitterness, and such a balanced, graceful and deep character that he too is represented as a puppet, guided by the hands of a fate so teminally out of his control.
The Indian approach to death, always represented by the colour white, combined with the rampant Catholicism in India, at once was the inspiration for the omniscient priesthood of faceless puppeteers, whom, as we grow old, bitter and inflexible, take our decisions and choices from us. This solemn priesthood additionally does what a true black velvet costume does for black theatre and blends the puppeteers into the background, allowing the puppet to awaken and capture us in a way that is beyond the limitations of a human performance.
The reputation India holds for beautiful fabric, the clarity with which Roy describes her characters and the truthful and beautiful transition to dramatic work by Timms and Clarke, made designing the costumes solve itself. The sourcing, construction, and altering of which however was anything but solved, and to whom we owe (and not for the first time) to the tireless efficiencies and experienced considerations of the college's wardrobe mistress Isabelle McGrath.
Lighting was complicated by the necessity of projecting words from the original text, and substitution of muslin for a reversed theatre gauze effect. The implications of which demanded a disproportionate use of side and top light. Added to which you have a setting renowned for extraordinary vivid colour and a need for all the melancholy and bittersweet emotion that the ambience of a monsoon can bring. Further considerations in lighting were to use a heavily saturated (coloured) state to define the past lives of given characters' in the script's complex narrative structure.
The gift of designing for it's stage, costume, lighting and puppets has been to date my most enjoyable and relishable experience in theatre. Working with the clear direction of Heather Timms has been inspirational, the complicit detail and thoroughness of puppet director (and co-maker) Karen Hethey has been enlightening, and with the exceptional talents of a gun (yet appropriately motley) crew, particularly AV designer Monique Wajon, has me confident that the future of design, management and technical support has a... as the last word that Ammu utters in Arundhati's novel: "... Naaley" (tomorrow).
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