The Shrieking Shack
“I was sitting in a sound studio, where my friend was putting in the finishing touches to some ad-film that we had worked on. It was way past midnight, around 3.00 am. The studio owner’s dog was sitting right next to the sofa on which I was sort of lounging.
Suddenly, the dog started growling. I looked over in surprise, because he was usually very well behaved – which is why he was allowed inside the studio. There he was, with his hackles raised, his tail down, staring pointedly at the open door of the dubbing booth – as if he could see someone there. And then I saw it. Okay, I don’t know if I SAW it, but I definitely could sense someone standing in the darkened dubbing booth, just out of the light.
If I strained my eyes, I could make out the shoulders, the head, the hair.It was standing silently, looking at my friend (who was still lost in his work). I stared at it for a couple of minutes, and then I blinked my eyes and it was gone. Suddenly, my friend leapt up from his chair without warning, and ran out of the room, followed by myself and the dog. Once outside, he looked at me and said, ‘Did you hear it, too? The breathing?’ Needless to say, we have never booked that particular studio for any assignment since that night.”
My friend finished narrating this incident, and I realized I had been holding my breath the entire time. My friend, who couldn’t act on stage to save his life, had just narrated the entire event with a gravitas that can only be gained through years dedicated to Stanislavski. It was there and then that I knew I wanted to try and recreate this feeling on stage. I called for a meeting with my theatre group, Theatron Entertainment, which at that point consisted of 5 members. After an hour of trying to describe the play that was beginning to take shape in my head, I decided the best way to pitch my ‘horror play’ was to write out a scene or two.
This was the first time I had formally decided to write a play. The moment I started to write the first scene in Marathi, I knew I had a problem. It was sounding too goofy. I faced the same problem in Hindi. I think years and years of watching horror films made by the Ramsay Brothers have formed a permanent association of the words ‘bhoot’, ‘pret’, and ‘aatma’ with a specific type of entertainment – which I wanted to stay away from. So I narrowed it down to English – which wasn’t a problem for me, having grown up with Blyton and Rowling.
It was around this time when I was earning most of my pocket-money from performing magic at Birthday parties. I decided this would provide the perfect background for a horror, play, and started adapting principles of stage magic into my script. Writing an effects oriented product becomes a very cumbersome job if the writer and director do not get along. I never had that problem , because I knew I would be directing the play myself – and I get along very well with myself, if I may say so myself!
I decided to write the play only at night, in the dark, so as to be in the right atmosphere. That sort of backfired, because I would scare myself so much that I would write in a little bit of humour into the script as a means of breaking the tension for myself. . I tried to include in all those little horror clichés that I loved, whilst putting a spin on them. Instead of having a horrific backstory, they were armed with what little knowledge they could salvage from the internet.
The casting didn’t take long, because I had based most of the characters on the people who were available (and could speak in English)! To their credit, my entire team just let me go crazy with the script, not questioning how some of the things that I had described in the stage directions (chairs flying, ghosts appearing on the stage, people being dragged around by invisible forces)would even be possible on stage.
Looking back, it’s a good thing that we had to do most of this in a hurry (two nights to write the script, 5 days to put up the play) because that didn’t give us a moment to pause and doubt whether any of this would work. We just had the time to get it done.
Almost 3 years and 60ish shows and a bunch of awards later, it seems almost laughable to remember how it all began – the play that taught us that it is way more enjoyable to listen to your audience’s screams than it is to hear just their applause.
So that, dear readers, is the story of how ‘Anathema’ was written
Thespo Ink 