Learning to Ace Cooking without Burning

(Image: via Ronnal's Instagram Handle)

In class 10th, as a part of catechism, we were supposed to put up a play. It was the first time that I found theatre to be a very interesting tool and decided that I’ll do something in this field for sure. But due to my inexperience, my first semester in college went by with me just giving auditions and failing miserably.

It was actually during an audition I gave for an external production when one of the directors, my senior, gave me extremely valuable feedback. He told me to add emotion to my monologues. It was such a basic idea but it had missed my mind completely. I realised I had been giving auditions like a rote-learned speech. I had been taught to give so much attention to diction and pronunciation that I forgot what it is to have a haphazard, incomplete and emotional conversation.

At the expense of sounding like a pretentious, self-obsessed theatre artist, I would like to quote an article by Russell Frank, titled ‘About This Story’, in which he writes, ‘When reporters write stories that read like good fiction, they inevitably arouse suspicions. Reality is messy. Speech is messy. If a story is tidy—if the plot is too seamless or the quotes are too eloquent—the reporter probably juiced it a little.’

In the same way, dialogues should be messy, acting should be messy, the whole act of putting up a show is to produce a piece that makes us and the audience feel connected, which cannot happen if we do not consider the multiple random elements that impact every scene.

This valuable piece of advice finally helped me secure an audition for the annual play. And even though I was on stage for just a few minutes I was overjoyed to finally be a part of a production and see the process hands-on.

The first time I got on stage, I looked up to see the backstage lights. I was lucky enough that in my third year I finally got the one and only opportunity to go up the ladder backstage and see the view from there. I also remember the first time I got the chance to work from the light room. Basically, from the day I stepped into the college hall I was intrigued by every aspect of it and by the end of my third year, it felt like College Hall was an integral part of my college life.

In my second year, I finally got the chance to be a part of a play that went for externals, and that was an out-of-the-world experience (quite literally, since we had to travel to a college in Haryana). We travelled by metro, then by bus and then we were provided with a green room where we changed into our costumes. All this process took up maybe half the day and we finally performed the show for 40-45 minutes. Honestly, I don’t even remember how or what we performed, all I remember is that we had fun before and after the event.

In the same year I participated in the Intra-Rajpal for the first time and was a part of three plays, which became five by the day of the event as some actors had emergencies at home and I rushed in to take their roles. Here, I learned a lot of team building exercises and made some friends whom I would better call family (just like Dom).

For the annual production that year, we performed ‘Rajmahal Circus’, an original, and that had been the largest annual production I had ever seen (I didn’t have any other production to compare with so I guess it’s okay to make such assumptions).

The end of that year was painful as our seniors were leaving college and it was up to us now to take charge of the Society, and God knows how many times we fell. Once you are a senior you realise you can’t evade responsibility and that there is just too much responsibility. Somehow, we managed to pull off most of the things. Some things didn’t happen because of the inevitable COVID and some things were just inevitable.

W. Ronnal Mathew Minaketan

B.Sc. Programme with Chemistry

Batch of 2020

External Head ’20