Out Of Control

Enjoyed an excellent afternoon at the Victoria Theatre this afternoon watching a revival of Haresh Sharma's Off Centre. I read the play back in 2006 when it had just been selected as an 'O' level Lit text and MOE were providing copies for schools, encouraging them to adopt it as one of the set texts for the examination. It struck me then as a powerful piece, but I found it a bit difficult to visualise how it was meant to work on stage, especially in the way the two mentally-challenged protagonists keep stepping out of character to comment on themselves. In the theatre this device works wonderfully well, especially as deployed by the excellent Abdulattif Abdullah and Sakinah Dollah playing Vinod and Saloma respectively.

I was also struck back then by a strong sense of how the drama seemed to transcend its origins as something of a thesis play dealing with specific issues relating to the treatment of those suffering mental illness. Vinod and Saloma seemed fully alive somehow, and tenderly complex. Their story wasn't predictable. And that's how it was this afternoon. Despite having read the play I had no idea how things were going to turn out.

Something else became very obvious to me this afternoon. This is one of those plays that wonderfully can't contain the energies it has tapped into, most of all the generous anger it manifests with regard to the treatment of those seen as somehow abnormal. At moments the rage was palpable in genuinely disturbing fashion. There was something going on that wasn't exactly under control and all the better for that.