Playwright: Prashant Prakash, Kalki Koechlin

Direction: Nayantara Kotian

Cast: Prashant Prakash, Kalki Koechlin

Duration: 1 hr 10 minutes

Language: English

Theater Group: Quaff Theatre

 

“The Skeleton Woman” introduces itself as a play about love, loneliness and what one must endure to be happy. What it delivers, however, is a mere skeleton of it. From obscure trimmings one pieces together the tale of a writer and his wife who are clambering up to find the ideal but are being pulled down by the actual.

 

The writer (an exaggerated stereotype) is perched on insanity and conjures sharks, a goose and a skeleton hand; while his wife (somewhat more grounded) attempts to tame him. What follows is a series of disoriented knick-knacks centred around ambition, completion and happiness. The plot is a quilting together of several episodes – real and delusional.

 

Prashant Prakash fails to portray the character with the gravitas it deserves. His performance is carried out with the casualness of a hallucinating teenager. Kalki Koechlin contrarily makes a consistent and commendable show of the writer’s wife.

 

The characters and their relationships are weakly cast; the symbols (the goose, the skeletal hand, the search for a complete story) too obscure to lend meaning, and the plot lacks wholesomeness. The dialogue too oscillates between literary and careless. The last two scenes of the play strive to give it an over-arching narrative structure but are a bit too late.

 

There are however a few things that salvage the play. What “The Skeleton Woman” lacks in content it compensates for in form. The music, lighting and haunting vocals weave in your attention from the opening of the play.

 

Nayantara Kotian deserves a hand for activating various facial and gestural elements. The play’s kinesics delight the eye; Kalki and Prakash move with the feline fluidity of sea-water.

 

The set with its skeletal sea-vessel, origami birds, paper silhouettes, and sheets of coloured writing paper enchant you, but are pulled down by the half-hearted narrative. Somewhere through the play you realize that “The Skeleton Woman” would be much better off as a mime.