Dramatics: Stage Fright

Readers, who might have read my previous story titled Dramatics…losing in style, must have an idea by now, how things can go wrong by destiny, fate, luck, or whatever one might call it. And there were those rare days when everything seemed to go as per the plan, only to be screwed up by human follies and in dramatics, something called the ‘stage fright’. This is one such story.

I was in my IXth standard, and owing to my prior experience in acting, I got to act with senior students on behalf of Lohit House (one of the four senior hostels). Being a junior in Sainik School, bought me the role of the waiter in the play, as seniors took more glamorous roles, like that of the dukes and kings. The highlight of our plays (dramas) used to be the stage, the realistic props like furniture (lifted off from some teacher’s living rooms), fireplace, cupboards, actual trees, cannons and doors.

Doors play a crucial role in the humor of the story. So I will talk about it in slight detail. Each door in our hostels (we call them Houses, apparently to feel like a family. Ha!) used to have four flaps, two with nets and two made from solid wood . Like many other things (e.g. the TV rooms without TVs), the netted doors were defunct as well. So we plucked them off from their frames, covered the hollow from the missing net with coloured papers and transformed them into props per excellence.

THE PLAY: The setting is a European restaurant (Don’t ask me which country. I am not sure if the director himself had any idea.). As expected, the scapegoat, the junior, that was me stood there, as the curtain moved to the sides. I stood there cleaning crockery, placed on a wooden table. The lighting on the stage was always such that it blinded the performers from seeing the audience. Yet in my imagination I could see our teacher, Mr. X sitting with an arrogant look, “that’s my table huh!” as a lesser arrogant teacher, Madam Y sat there with “those are my crockery” look.

The play was going fine, and it was my turn to take the bill and enter the stage, and my script read somewhat like this, “Master Bull has sent the bill”. Now there was this senior student, Mr. R who sat there, looking anemic with acute stage fright. And before I could deliver my speech, he looked at me and said, “Why have you got the bill?” I wanted to run away from the stage and a minute presence of mind saw the words coming out of my mouth, “Coz master Bull has sent it”. It might have gone unnoticed to most amongst the audience. But I felt something worse was about to come, seeing the skin colour of Mr.R changing from red to greenish blue.

I prepared a tray of fake wine, and I had to carry it to the stage. The wooden doors stood there, separating the back stage and the front stage, as coloured papers hid the hollow from the missing nets of the door. I went towards the front stage, as suddenly, Mr. R shut the doors out of the blue. In spite of timely braking, my hands along with the tray pierced through the hollow colour papers, and there the poor waiter stood in the backstage, with half of his limbs in the front stage. Unlike my previous story, no one laughed, as another actor showed some amount of responsibility, as he helped me extract my hands, now wet with fake wine. The history of dramatics in our school is replete with such incidents, some told and mostly untold.