The Dramatic Arts : Girivalam

Many times, as a person who reviews art on the internet, I have to take into account the fact that every person has a different opinion about what is makes a piece of art good. This means that I may have to pull some punches in the negatives department because I set a really high standard (for example I hate ‘masala’ movies) and everyone may not agree with them.

But once in a while something like Girivalam comes along, and I can’t help but let loose all of my frustration. So before I go any further I would like to formally apologize for all the hate in this “review”.

Now that that’s out of the way *Cracks Knuckles*; this stage play is, to me, everything that is wrong with the drama industry. It is a poor excuse for a play, which has no right to be on stage in front of an audience, parading itself as if it’s the best thing to happen to live theater since its invention. It is an uncoordinated, unrehearsed, unplanned, unpleasant, unforgivable stinking hot mess, which came closer to driving me insane than my twelfth boards.

I could just end the review here and ask you not to see it, but that would be unethical of me, so here is the breakdown of the play: It is a historical, fictional account about Thiruvannamalai and the religious practice of Girivalam.

Cast and Crew:

Story, Dialogues, Songs and Direction - Kalai Chemmal A.P.S Manimaran

Asst. Direction - N Balasubramanian

Music Production- Joyful Gopu

Sets and Costumes - Madurai Kannan - Padma Stage

Make-up - Bonda Mani

Lights - Mano Lights

Music - N Kandasamy

Stage management - A Nagarajan, M.Nedumaran, R K Madhivanan

Cast - N Balasubramanian, M Thirumaran, S Jayapal, k S Vijayakumar, M Annamalai, Kumara Srinivasan, R Kaliyaperumal, R Jayakumar, G Srihari, R Prince, Sivadurai Thangaraj, M K Kannan, M Easter Anburaj, P Gopalakrishnan, M saraboji Srinivasan, D Thambusamy, J Kalyanasundaram, J King Faizal (Sivan), M Sivasri, Ko. Rajamogana Sivam –Sivachariyaar, Pudhuvai Bharathi, Puduvai Viji – Veerammal, Natuvangam - Kudandhai Lakshminarayanan & Party

Production - Kutralam Thamizhannai Productions

Marketing - Sridevi Fine Arts

What I liked:

If you are honestly expecting something in this section after my introduction, then you will be surprised to know that this stage play does have some redeeming qualities. The set design and costumes for all the characters by ‘Padma Stage’ Kannan (who invited me to review this drama) was near perfect and the makeup by ‘Bonda’ Mani is truly amazing.

There are three dances in the play which are somewhat okay.

Unfortunately that’s pretty much it.

What could have been better I Hated:

Sometimes good set design and makeup can inspire the actors to do a good job. Sadly that is not the case. Featuring some of the worst acting I have seen this play puts some of the worst movies to shame. The actors either have no charisma or have too much charisma. That is to say they seem to be reading from a teleprompter or aiming for an Oscar.

Speaking of Teleprompters, actors on stage were forgetting dialogues and they had to be prompted by people behind the sets, all of which could be heard by the. And there I was sitting in the seventh row hearing all this praying that the guy who was prompting them would at least come in front of the mike and say the dialogues himself so that I could walk out of the theater before my brain melted from looking at the utter nonsense happening on stage as the actors fumbled with their dialogues.

With uninspiring, essay like passages of emotionless exposition written in such a convoluted manner that I could understand just as much as pig Latin, the stage play drags on and on and on without having any mercy on the audience.

Speaking of dragging on and on and on, this … thing… is three hours long, with no interval. Plays which are an hour and a half long have intervals and I haven’t the faintest about what convinced the director that the play was good enough, to be three hours long, let alone have no interval. I guess he was afraid people would leave. But if that was the case, the idea failed miserably because of the fifty meager people who attended the screening thirty of them left within the first two hours.

Moving on to the director. I am in no position to comment on him, as much as I want to, because this is the only stage play of his that I have seen. But that being said, this is one of the worst directed plays I have seen, if not the worst. The actors have no idea what to do on stage when someone else is spouting their dialogues and they have no idea where to stand, to the point where someone backstage was trying desperately to hide his hands while he asked them to step forward and move back.

The people on stage had no clue that they should not look at someone backstage when they are in front of the audience and they had no idea under which light to stand, in spite of so many shiny lights provided by Mano Lights.

But, I must take my hat off to the director. He was able to create two characters who I managed to hate more than King Joffery in Game of Thrones. In the name of comedy, these two ‘actors’ manage to be icing on the most garbage filled cake ever. I hated every moment they were on stage, which means that I hated more than two hours of the drama. While they may have been veterans of the stage in their prime all they did was make everything twenty times worse.

I am proud to say that I have been watching movies and stage plays from the age of five. That’s a good thirteen years of movies and plays. Never have I ever, in all this time, seriously considered walking out of the theaters however bad the content was. Girivalam achieved what I thought was impossible. *Slow Clap*

Five hundred and fifty words out of the eight hundred and fifty words before this sentence and I’m not done yet.

Moving on, this play has more time with the curtain down and lights off than it does with the opposite. Every twenty seconds the curtain drops and the lights go out. The longest scene was probably a three and a half minutes long, while the longest curtain drop was well over a minute long. 

All of this was accompanied by the actors fumbling in the dark and shouting expletives while the mike was on.

The story is for the most part, incomprehensible. I had no clue what was going on for the first hour, and the play itself doesn’t know when it is going into a flashback and when it is telling the actual story. The worst part about it is that the story does not have enough substance to have a three hour run time. Bloated with unnecessary content which make no sense to the actual plot, this story is committing a heinous crime by being three hours long.

Jesus Christ, or should I say, O! Arunachala, all of this and I have not even gotten to the music yet… right, moving on. My connection to the world of live theater is through my dad, who produces music for a lot of stage plays. He uses recorded tracks and sequences them on his laptop, and seldom is there live music involved partly because of technical constraints and also due to the fact that in this day and age it is not that practical to use live music.

He did not make music for this play. But what caught my attention was that they were using live music. They had a guy on the keyboard, who was the music producer, a guy on the mirudhangam and a guy on vocals. To be light about the music, it was mind melting. Badly timed background music, played badly on the keyboard, along with the worst vocals, which didn’t match the music at all, were played on repeat over and over and over again.

With a suspense and thrill theme every time something happened on stage, the music gave this devotional stage play a spy thriller feel, with the story along the lines of : “There is a bomb in Thiruvannamalai, and it is up to Lord Vishnu and his team of elite soldiers to stop it.” What in God’s name was the music director thinking?

When I mentioned earlier that the dances were somewhat decent, what I meant was that they were accompanied by the worst music recital ever. Period. For everything that the dancers tried to make it look good, the singer did a worse enough job that it took away the positive parts of the dance and then some.

Some technical faults with the music which I got after consulting with my father are listed below:

1.    Music plays a vital role in Historical drama and it is not the Bangs and the Punches that matter but the Ragas and Instruments used which do. Electronic music and western tunes were not played during those times. And, please, know the difference between sitar and veena music; at least when Brahma and Saraswathi are on stage.

2.    With music director Shri Soundaryan in the audience, the prayer was sung in one shruthi while the keyboardist fumbled with a totally different shruthi till the end. Electronic shruthi boxes are cheap and are more accurate than the singer, most of the time.

3.   When Nandhi came on stage playing the mirudhangum, the instrument was upside down (gives a whole new meaning to the term south paw) and the music was Arabic! Surprising, isn’t it?

4.    The height of it was Nadanam Aadinaar being sung in Adi Talam while it is supposed to be in Kanda Jathi Ada Thalam. The Charanams were sung properly but when it came to the Pallavi once again, it went back to the wrong talam. Poor Gopalakrishna Bharathi. I hope the grave he is turning in is comfortable.

While I am not an expert in Carnatic music, my father sure is, and I can safely say that these facts are provided with the proper reference. Through all of this, my complaint is that they should have gone either fully Carnatic or performed it all live. Not a dirty mash-up of both with weird transitions

But somehow, through all of this, what got me the most was that every person who wanted to see this mess of a play had to pay from five hundred to two thousand rupees for the ticket. While I didn’t have to pay as I was invited as a reviewer, in no way shape or form is this sum of money warranted. These people should be paying the audience two thousand rupees for sitting through their play. 

Final Thoughts:

Girivalam completely sapped the soul out of me. For the love of all that is holy and pious it has no reason to exist, and it is a complete waste of time, space, money and the brain cells which are used to process it. This is the kind of play which you leave feeling desensitized and numb with no faith in humanity.

The two things I have Girivalam to thank for is for providing me the opportunity go on this rant, and showing me that however bad something I have seen, there is always something even worse.

I give Girivalam 1/2 out of 5 stars.

But after all the hate I have spewed on this play and director, people who know me personally know that this is not the worst I can say about something that is this bad. And to an extent I have to agree.

I did not go all out because of one simple fact: Even after all this I hope that this troupe improves. I hope the director improves and they go on to make a great play. But until then, the anger on this post is all that I have for them.

This may not be warranted but still:

Peace!!!