For some reason I have been made to believe that I can write in English. Well that’s blasphemy by itself. Now I also believe that I can Write and Act in a French Play.
About 3 Weeks back my A2 Level Teacher Mme Gisele at Alliance Francaise de Madras
told that we as a class have to do something for the Fete de l’ete (The Summer Festival) at the AFM. So the class decided to do a play and I for reasons beyond my control and understanding wrote a rough play in English. (It was so rough that I actually scraped my elbow while writing it. Read Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 and Page 4 of the play – English Version ) Anyways… We managed to translate that to French with the help of Mme Gisele of course and went on to decide who would play which part.
This was what we decided.
Customer 1 Siddarth
Customer 2 Catherine
The Security Guard The Pseudonym,(Yeah that’s me people)
The Manager InbaShekhar
The Service Representative Gomati Shankar
We had tonnes of fun practising for the play. Though after 3 days of getting our lines, the intonation and placement right we figured out that the play just lasted for 2mins and 15 seconds. So while I asked people to slow their dialogue delivery Siddarth came up with “French is a Fast Language” though I was bursting to tell “Well but we ain’t French, are we?” I did not because Siddarth is the kid of the class and damn near brilliant.(He did get on my nerves once though by going yippity yippity yap.) So we added some lines and worked some more till we were quite satisfied with the end result. We were going to take centre stage for exactly 3 minutes on The D – Day.
Now I have to introduce two very important characters who helped us during the play. Latha was going to be the Narrator and Divya was going to prepare the Boards and Signs that we needed.( Though there was no news from Divya and no Sign from Heaven that she was going to turn up 30 minutes after the actual play with the boards, So Siddarth and Inbashekhar were given the responsibility of making the Boards and the Signs.)
So we enacted the play at around 1815 hrs on Friday the 16th at the Alliance Francaise Open Air Theater, to the background score of Chennai Traffic on College Road and with failed microphones. It lasted somewhere in the vicinity of 3 minutes. And we got some of Catherine’s friends to hold the Title board for us. Thanks Kiddos. As usual I forgot to get their names…
Well I should say we were indeed lucky. We breezed in and out of centre stage, our audience was primarily kids, and I don’t think anyone understood us. We were all happy that we were not treated to rotten eggs and tomatoes. Though no one clapped for us either.
One more thing during our so called practice sessions we ate and drank a lot of stuff from Yusuf’s “La Cantine” at the Alliance Francaise. His Cakes are simply amazing. Check them out if you are a foodie. Try Saturdays. Other days you can hardly reach beyond the canteen doors.
Click Here to watch a voiceless us chatting away to glory.
