A peek into the world of Chekhov

LIGHT MOMENTS

For almost a month now, a group of students from Christ Junior College have been spending at least two hours after college, working on a small production with a desire to share the classic short stories of Chekhov with their friends.

The small workshop, conducted by The Pierian Spring (Department of English), saw the final staging of a series of short plays by the students.

Taking the guidance of ex-Christites and theatre personalities, two of the students — Avinash Daniel and Anirudh Acharya, say they had loads of fun exploring the actors within them. 

With a focus on the wit, laughter and human emotions that are so obvious and synonymous to Chekhov, the first play to be staged was The Senseless Creature, in which, a woman with a nervous disorder tries to extract money from a banker.

Due to technical glitches, the play was hardly audible but the cast slowly settled in with another classic of Chekhov’s called The Drowning Man.

Revolving around a man in the maritime entertainment business, who drowns himself for a small fee, the play was filled with satire and humour. Edul Govadia did a good job and got the crowd’s attention as the drowning man.

This was followed by Sneeze, which had the entire hall filled with laughter.

It is a beautiful story about a ‘sneezer’, who is a junior clerk sitting just behind his boss watching an opera and cannot control his misfired sneezing nor his effusive apologising to his boss.

It was indeed a delightful play that kept the audience in fits of laughter. Sanketh gave a convincing performance as a man afraid of losing his job for sneezing.

He followed it up with Surgery, the story of a priest (Ryan) with a toothache, who is in the clutches of an inexperienced dental assistant. Both Sanketh and Ryan gave very good performances.

Concluding the production with Audition and Too Late For Happiness, the students were more than satisfied with their performances and even their friends thoroughly enjoyed the show.

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