Power play

An absurd play premiering this weekend depicts how human beings in positions of authority are prone to subjugate those below them

It was 19th century British politician Lord Acton who had once said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” What he’d meant is that the amount of authority a person wields is inversely proportional to their sense of moral judgment. It’s a thought that was the central premise of the 2001 German film Das Experiment, which was based on a psychological study called The Stanford Prison Experiment. The idea was that two groups of everyday people were asked to volunteer for a social study, where one played the role of jailors and the other played the role of inmates. It was all amicable enough in the beginning. The two groups existed in harmony. But gradually, as time went by, the jailors became increasingly drunk on power and started acting in the most torturous manner with their victims, the hapless inmates. Why? Simply because they could, given the authority they wielded.

That’s also the central premise of a new play that will premiere this evening, The Age of Prison. It has an absurd plot where two people find themselves in a prison cell for a crime they aren’t even aware of committing, and who are at the mercy of a jailor who is fascist to the core. This jailor treats the inmates like puppets who he can make dance, cry, laugh or scream at will. The victims have no hope of escape, except for the audience. They are the ones who can decide their fate, because the live online performance that will be staged at Harkat Studios is structured in such a way that the viewer — through messages — can try and persuade the jailor to set them free.

Ankit Verma, Rashmi Mann and Humhu

Ankit Verma has written and directed it. He also enacts the role of one of the inmates (Rashmi Mann is the other, while Humhu plays the jailor). Verma admits that there is a sense of fatalism that underlines the plot. “There is no hope in this brutal world where extremists have taken over,” he says alluding not just to the dystopian world he has created for The Age of Prison, but the actual world that we live in. Yet — almost paradoxically — he also says that even when there is no hope left at all, there is still hope left. What that means is that when everything around you crumbles and you feel that you have reached the end of the line, you still have the power to pull up your socks and turn things around. Let’s say that your relationship with your partner has hit a brick wall. Or, that you have been sacked from a job for no fault of yours. Or even that you are a citizen of a country that is ruled unjustly by an iron hand. “All you have to do is buckle up,” Verma reasons. It’s only then that hope truly springs, he adds, because — to end with this article with another aphorism — God helps those who help themselves.   

On February 13, 7 pm  onwards  
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Cost Rs 300

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