If performing an English play set in the UK is a task, then getting the British accent right is a bigger task. The storyline of the play Murder was fully in line with the caution it flashed in its brochure — ‘only for strong hearted people’.
As the name suggests, the play involves killing but one wouldn’t call it scary. The crew responsible for the light and sound tried every trick in the bag, but the sequences were hardly those that would make one tremble in fear.
As for the Brit accent, it should be said that the actors couldn’t leave their Indian influences.
When a play begins with a brief introduction about the setting — “It is in a time when there were no mobile phones or laptops” you being to imagine a room with wooden boxes, chests and trunks with intricate Victorian carvings on them, elaborate light fixtures, type writers, and stone or wooden walls to complete the ancient British look. The set does justice to your imagination.
The play, essentially a play within a play, revolves around a greedy playwright Sidney Bruhl (Aamir Raza Hussain) who is a skilled murderer. Being a rich and famous playwright, Sidney can’t stand the thought of someone outshining him. He has killed people with good scripts, earlier.
What was admirable about Sidney was his sense of humour when he joked with his artist wife Myra Bruhl (Ragini Verma) on several occasions through the play. Even after many years of marriage, she seems to have not come to terms with the fact the her husband killed people with good play scripts. Clifford Anderson (Damandeep Sidhu), a young, charming and aspiring playwright becomes the victim of Bruhl’s evil ways and dies when he visits the Bruhls to get his script approved. In the second half, Clifford rises from the dead — comes from the ‘vegetable patch’ he was buried in and kills Bruhl by smashing his head with a stone. Myra has a heart attack and collapses in one moment.
Later, we discover that it was Bruhl and Cliff’s plan to ‘get together’. It did not come across if they were trying show Bruhl and Cliff as lovers and that Myra was nothing less than a hurdle between the two. The psychic Helga Ten Dorp’s ( Virat Husain) predictions and lawyer Porter Milgrim’s (Mukund Murthy) guest appearance are mere filler performances and do not quite take the story forward.
Despite faulty logic, with many a twist and turn, the play is worth one watch.
The play has been directed by Aamir Raza Husain and Virat Husain. It was staged at Sheraton Park Hotel and Towers over the weekend.
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