Ram Ganesh Kamatham, whose plays, Dancing on Glass , Snakes and Ladders, and The Crab, were performed earlier at Ranga Shankara, was back this weekend with “Creeper”.

It featured two people of Bengaluru…one , a young woman (Nikhila Mahadevan) writing an essay about the ancient demon, Betaal, and a young man ( Abhishek Majumdar), whose entire life seems to be only online. The two are unable to agree on how to present their stories….it was a re-imagination of the stories of Vikram and Betaal.

The play moved from pornography to Orkut to Chandamama comics, and moved through blogging and Dracula to allusions to Silk Smitha and Kurt Cobain, and a big tree with a Barbie doll nailed to it…and it featured a magical box with several things inside.

The two actors were really superb; their dialogue timing was excellent, and drew laughs from the audience initially, but the mood became more sombre later.

However, at the end of the play, the various allusions and reference did not quite come together, and the pathos of the young woman’s mental illness was wrenching, without its relevance to the play being explained. But then, since it was an experimental show, and is yet in “the bare bones” stage (according to the brochure), I hope that the edges are smoothened out with more performances. The lights by Ajith Hande were very well handled indeed, as the lighting added immensely to the mood of the play. The stage management (Tasneem, Santosh) was good, too.

Perhaps, simplifying the narrative a bit would help; it was not always clear how the modern references melded into the ancient stories. At times, it was rather bewildering, even as the performance of the actors impressed.

I am looking forward to watching future productions of this play to see how it evolves.

You can also see Ram Ganesh Kamatham’s blog at

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