• A review of Stages Theatre Company’s ‘PING! Virtually everything is fine’

These days I am reading a book titled A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence, which the better-known writer Margaret Atwood has called “An almost perfect book”. This passage comes in it, a conversation between a mother and her 30-plus unmarried daughter who had had to return to the small town to look after the elder woman:

“‘Rachel – aren’t you ready yet?’

‘Yes, I am just coming now.’

‘Oh – are you going to wear that orange scarf, dear? Isn’t it a little bright, with your green coat?’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Well, perhaps not. I would have thought your pink one would’ve gone better, that’s all. But never mind. You wear whichever one you want.’

I won’t change. I don’t like the pink scarf. But now I won’t feel right about the orange one, either. If ever I said to her, ‘this is what you do,’ she’d be hurt and astounded and would deny it. She believes absolutely that she never speaks ill of anyone or harmfully to a soul... Her weapons are invisible, and she would never admit even to carrying them, much less putting them to use.”

And then, around the same time as reading this book, I sat in the dark at the Lionel Wendt and watched a mother and daughter have this conversation in the drama PING! produced by the Stages Theatre Company:

Noorah: What happened here? (Looks at the table)

Jah: What?

Noorah: What have you done!?

Jah: I… arranged it.

Noorah: I arranged it before!  

Jah: My god! I can’t! You always do this to me…

Noorah: Can you please arrange it the way it was?

Jah: There is nothing wrong with it!

Noorah rearranges the things on the table.

Jah: No, it’s fine! I’ll put it back.

Jah rearranges.

Noorah: That is not how you do it! 

Jah: Ok, do it then…

Noorah: You are not going to help me? 

Jah: Let me do it on my own!

Noorah: You’re not doing it properly.

Jah: Noorah! Please stop micro-managing!

Noorah: You are trying to make me look bad. I know you.

Jah: (forced calm) Tell me. Tell me what you want me to do.

Noorah: Move those plates to the left.

Jah complies.

Jah: Happy, Noorah?  

As a mother – and as a daughter too – there was much I could relate to in both these instances. The book I could put away when it hit somewhat powerfully and I needed rest, but the play was relentless in its unfolding – there was no way of escaping emotions that included wanting to lay punches at a few people on stage. I hadn’t felt that angry for a long time in a theatre.

Impact on audience

I think PING! affected everyone differently depending on who you were. The younger crowd who made up my group reacted differently at different places – laughing when I didn’t, for example, and perhaps having different spine-chilling moments of déjà vu than me. For spine-chilling it was for adults, at times, in the visceral way it dealt with young people’s problems from their own point of view – never for a moment could you doubt that this was a play written by those who were not mothers and fathers yet. Every wart and blimp of parenting was fully under the spotlight on stage – and I doubt if there was any adult there who could not identify with one or another of the ‘mistakes’ thrown quite powerfully at our faces by these young actors.

Of course, the problems were class-specific too as they tend to be. The setting was from the middle or upper-middle class, mainly English-speaking families. The issues associated with them may not have been the ones that affect the majority of the population of Sri Lanka, though problems unfolding through social media platforms seem to be rather universal now. In any case, restricting discussion to a class that is a minority doesn’t make the depictions of their emotions any less valid. There is an honesty in dealing with problems associated with your own life no matter to which strata that life belonged to – people like this live, they deserve their stories to be told too, and sometimes the issues they grapple with are universal.

Like the main problem affecting the main character, Dirk. I can hazard a guess that this was one thing that made many young people uncomfortable that evening – incestuous feelings are never easy to discuss. That it may be a biological factor that needs to be seen as such and would probably pass away, was the only good piece of advice that an adult gave a younger person in the whole play. That moment too is undermined by the fact that the adult is not the boy’s father, and his actual son is seen listening to this conversation and hears the father say that he would prefer to have this kind of problem than what he actually does with his own son. There is no relief in this moment too, therefore, for the audience.

His own son’s problems are the problems of a generation that lives in a virtual reality – the internet persona being a far cry from the nervous stuttering young man this son is in actual life. And yet, the father’s merciless insistence on pushing him to be other than he is, still seems very harmful. It is actually that sense of not mattering to the father that drives this young man to the final cruelty three young people unleash on another.

From the other two, one is almost a caricature of a shallow, social media based, rather unintelligent girl – or even someone who has a lot of growing up to do, if one is kinder. The other is a truly annoying child, hyper to the point of danger. Together with the SM influencer, they form a rather deadly group when they feel slighted – and their cruelty is given fangs when slogans from movements like the “Me Too” one becomes easily adaptable without any real understanding of what they stand for.

One stark evil – somehow that word doesn’t feel inappropriate – was their sense of entitlement; they had no problem in trying to destroy a 12-year-old child’s mind as revenge for any disrespect shown to them, imagined or otherwise. What they did at the end with Dirk’s phone was truly maddening; the ending of the play swung dizzyingly between safety and tragedy – and just at the moment the brother and sister could finally hug each other without any sexual connotations after a very long time, the curtain falls on a tragedy foretold by the “ping” that goes off in every adult’s phone simultaneously, carrying a notification of a message that should not have seen the light of day.

Virtual problems

The “ping” is ubiquitous – as it is in life as we live it now, with all of us probably equally caught in its restless allure. The name of the play captures the power of social media platforms that people depended on almost completely during the pandemic times – that became the main medium of communication for young people caught within their houses – though in this case the apartment dwellers could actually meet physically. The play skilfully shows the problems associated with one platform – probably WhatApp: one can never know who actually wrote the message – in this case a serious, thoughtful girl supplies words to a rather unthinking one to send to the boy the latter likes, and precipitates a relationship that should never have taken place; one might forget that it’s a group chat and say things that should not be seen by others; it becomes easy to spread evil all around to multiple phones, by the simple and easy press of a button.

The young people have written a play, therefore, that deals with the problems of their own making as well as those created by the adults around them. The only one who seemed to understand what is what was the girl named Jah, who was almost a relief to see on stage as she seemed to personify sense when no one else did, just like the youngest girl child seemed to personify innocence. In a way, all the young people became symbols of something – guilt, shallowness, virtually built-up personality, hyperactive attention seeking child and so on. Yet that allegorical level worked, it opened up a range of personalities we do find in the modern probably city-based young people’s world. Even the adults could be categorised as something or other but as a whole their obliviousness to the problems of their children was startling. The most annoying, personally, was the mom who decides to take the responsibility of making the other parents “better” when she herself was making rather a meal of it with her own kids.

The writers and the actors

I was very interested in finding out who wrote this play, and was told that it was a collaborative effort by young people led by Ruwanthie de Chickera. I have been a fan of Ruwanthie’s writing from decades ago – her recent Dear Children, Sincerely tackled a much-needed rewriting of Sri Lankan history. To find out that she was workshopping a group of young people in the art of playwrighting was truly uplifting, and given the play that was written, it is good that we take note of the lead writers Banuja Nethusara Dehigaspage, Hajarah Faleel and Samuel Sundaralingam who were supported by Akmal Hamid, Nivedhith Jeyashanker and Kithmi Ranatunga, and hope that they become the next generation of serious playwrights in Sri Lanka. I wondered why they had a printout of the Acts and Scenes on the chairs at Lionel Wendt – I didn’t find the plot difficult to follow. It was fragmentary and episodic – but it hung together well and made a story.

Movements between scenes were slick and polished, sometimes characters being wheeled onto the stage on the prop itself. Minimalist decor also heightened the tension – the one surrealist moment was when the ‘suicide-jump ledge’ was casually used as a place for sitting down to have a chit chat – and multiple locations were handled well, especially in the scene all the young people were simultaneously shown texting each other in their separate apartments. The lack of long pauses between scenes kept the intensity of the play unflagging.

A mention about the acting before I end – it was very good overall. Some needed more acting skill than others, I felt – all the young people in fact: the influencer was very convincing in his weird switches between personalities; young Shakeel acted well enough to make one want to sock him one on the jaw; Kaya was superb in her depiction of a very careless and self-centred young woman.

Among the adults, Noorah stood out in her oblivious, self-obsessed personality – the only time some authentic mothering was seen was when she begs her son to be careful with what he does to others – the rest of the time she set herself up to be intensely disliked by both mature adults like me and young people, I think. The influencer’s father seemed very familiar too – the macho dude like guys are not difficult to find here. There was this girl on stage who acted the character of Jah who seemed a young version of Ruwanthie de Chickera herself – both in her body and very subtle gestures – and it was a bit disorienting till someone told me later that it was, in fact, her daughter. How lovely to have a second generation not too far from the rather awesome ways of the first!

Reason for hope

This play gives me hope. It shows the existence of a young pool of writers and actors who are unafraid to put controversial thoughts on paper, who can act at very professional levels, and over and above everything, can consider their art to be worth the thought and serious work they put into it. Lihan Mendis co-directed this with Ruwanthie and produced it – that’s another young man on whom we can pin a lot of expectations. I have only seen him acting once – and that was at a prize giving of Trinity College or something, where he stripped himself partially on stage with a very irreverent political skit – but it was enough to give an idea of what he was capable of. This was the young ensemble of the Stages Theatre Group. It was a young people’s play – on young people hangs the future – and in Sri Lanka, where the future is greatly to be feared in many aspects – this calls for celebration.

(Madhubhashini Disanayake Ratnayake is an academic and author. She won the GratiaenPrize in 2011 for her novel There is Something I Have to Tell You. She is a senior lecturer at the Department of English Language Teaching at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura)