'Halfway House Essay\r'

'‘Aadhe Adhure’ or ‘ center(a) House’ has often been describe as a cross mingled with naturalist Theatre and Theatre of the Absurd. Interestingly, two these ele homophilepowerts actu eachy swing each(prenominal) other as delegacy turn tailwork forcets and atomic number 18 verbalise to bring forth polarized western discipline. Naturalism argues for genetic endowment and a global perspective on service macrocosm behavior, which is said to develop out of the social purlieu in which a grumpy individual lives. On the contrary, Absurdism believes that in that location argon no solutions to the mysteries of hu military homohoods because in the end hu hu gay is al wizard, forced to perform repetitive actions in a humanness without meaning.\r\nThis monkey has many elements of naturalist theatre, including a linear movement, a limited epoch span, an in-depth psychological acknowledgmentization and a outlined beginning, locate and end. How ever, the opening line†â€Å"Once again, the resembling thing both over again…” firmly typecasts it as a part of Absurdist theatre, as from the start itself at that place is a hint at circularity of scourts and a hopelessness and banality fixd by the repetition of the word ‘again’ in the short sentence.\r\nMohan Rakesh borrowed a common device from the theatre of the Absurd and in ‘Aadhe Adhure’, for the first time in Indian theatre the alike(p) actor was used to forgather five characters. gibe to Rakesh, â€Å"The woman is the central character and I want the quartet men to be play by the similar actor. What I want to exhibit by that is that it’s non the individual who’s liable for his situation, for he would have make the equivalent prime(prenominal) no matter what, regardless of the situation. whatsoever option any cardinal makes has a received irony in it, for things turn out the kindred regardless of the choice.”\r\nthough it was passed off by some tyros as a gimmick employed by the playwright, its thematic relevancy came to the fore when Rajinder Nath, contrary to his own views on the vastness of the technique, directed the play victimization five dissimilar actors for the roles. The finding was felt to be severely absent as the picture of inherent ‘similarity’ in each the men which underlines the climax of the play failed to have the same(p) impact. Interestingly, though Savitri implies that it is beneath their appearance, that this ‘same man’ exists, the implication is exclusively forceful for the hearing because of the synchronal visual impact of one man playing different roles.\r\nAccording to Nath himself it was a powerful theatrical device â€Å"to show how correspond to one’s convenience the same man move put on different m shoots depending on the situation in which he is slurd”.\r\nThat the authorial view c orroborates with this assertion is count about from the prologue where the ‘ gay in the black fount’ equates identity with fluidity and c onlys himself undefined. Each character, given a certain set of circumstances, can occupy the place of a nonher. This to a fault follows the assumption that there is no veridical development or evolution of character; the character at the beginning of the play leave alone not be shaped differently by the situation, enforcing the intellect of a universality of roll in the hay, that â€Å"things turning out the same regardless of choice”.\r\nThe prologue defines the play as ‘unbody structured’. The audience is told that there is a bit of each character in all of them. Those watching the play and even those orthogonal the theatre. The characters ar said to be people â€Å"you bump into by chance in the street” stressing the alienation of urban crowd from one another as the source of difference as sa lubrious as similarity, since they atomic number 18 all nameless, facetless people who can easily get garbled in a crowd comprising of the same. Therefore, one man can play five characters because they are, in essence, the same man. This likeness is reiterated by the naming of the characters in their dialogues, not individually, exclusively quite as runner human race, fleck Man, etc. According to the Hindi version of the play, the Man in the dull Suit â€Å"has a appear of civility with a touch of cynicism”; the face of the First man â€Å"expresses the helpless anguish of having lost the battle of deportment”; the Second Man is â€Å"self-satisfied and all the same a little insecure”; the Third Man â€Å"projects an air of someone who is committed to a purport of convenience”; and the Fourth Man â€Å"looks older, quite grow and shrewd”.\r\nThey have different characteristics, bread and scarcelyterstyles and manners of address, thus far according to critics Nita Kumar and N. S. Dharan, this device makes use of the inherent notion of playacting which includes the concept of license; to pretend and be whatever one likes. Every man be an actor and therefore, it is easy for him to put up a façade and to hide his interiority according to the demands of the situation. This concept is emphatic not by the occurrence that the same man plays all the characters, solely rather by the summit that it is possible for the same man to play all the characters. Simply by changing his costume and seventh cranial nerve expression, he manages to change into a different person entirely. Therefore, the assertion of the prologue of the interchangeability of these characters is understandable.\r\nThe lineatic element in the play arises out of the contention of the Man in the Black Suit that interchange of roles can carry off place not only between the men in the play but also between the man and the woman. This strik es a discordant note as, according to critic Arti Mathur, it negates Savitri’s gender-specific struggle against social timiditys. whizz of the biggest contributions to the ‘sameness’ of the multiple characters is that they are all men. And men, by the patriarchic definition especially prevalent in urban middle-class India, have a certain societal role which leads to their convergence into one man. irrespective of circumstances their purview in society is defined while that of the woman is defined in copulation to the man.\r\nHowever, the pedagogy is not entirely improper either as Savitri, as the breadwinner of the household is actually the ‘man of the house’. Every society has an economic stem turn and a cultural superstructure, which is derived from the infantry. In Halfway House, the base has shifted and it is the wife who is economically free-living, however, the disaster of the ironically named Savitri lies in the position that the su perstructure has not shifted in accordance with the base. Mahendranath has not become the domestic centre just because of his childbed to the house; Savitri is still required to fulfill her ‘feminine’ domestic duties. She is defined by the context of what it subject matter to be a woman and has internalized the patriarchal system. This is also made clear by Savitri’s disrespect of what she believes is Mahendranath’s lack of manliness. She despises his dependency on herself as well as Juneja and constantly inquisitiones for miss routes by dint of other, more suitable men.\r\nAn element of unrealism is brought in, in which even the characters seem to be aware of an central similarity between the men, a device not unattached to them as characters. Askok’s sketch of Singhania leads Savitri to ask Binni if the portrait reminds her of someone, and on being asked, â€Å"Whom”, she replies â€Å"Your father.” This intermingling of the play and the outside elements draws attention to this device.\r\nThere is irony in the fact that one of the ways in which these men are actually the ‘same’ is in their growth of Savitri. According to critic Veena Das, these characters are seldom all of a piece, they are the broken images of a decomposing society.\r\nMahendranath is a self-described ‘ quick study’ and is later shockingly revealed to be a cause wife-beater. His inability to hold the position of the ‘head’ of the family has made him bitter and suspicious; suspecting his wife of illicit liaisons, which, although hinted at are never confirmed by the text. His ‘unmanliness’ makes Savitri lose all respect for him, till their pairing is reduced to a sham of public expectations.\r\nSinghania treats Savitri with clientele and his ‘favors’ are granted with an obvious air of patronization. His apostolic manner and speech is calculated to make the attendant fe el inferior, a fact that is explicitly say by Ashok. However, in Savitri’s eyes his position as her boss and his salary makes him ‘superior’ and she system silent in face of his thinly-veiled innuendos and his humiliation post of her as â€Å"one of his child’s ‘aunties’”. His porcine behavior is a caricature of the sexual exploitation that women have to deal with in work places.\r\nJagmohan is introduced just about an antithesis of Mahendra. He is suave, successful, with a man-of-the- worldly concern air and is presented as the ordinal hour rescuer. He is the only outcome uncommitted to her from the â€Å"hell” that her house has become to her. However, this apparent proactive position loses much of its worth as it is change by the fact that she waits for Jagmohan to ‘fetch’ her. She overlooks his barbs at her expense and goes with him willingly, an act in defiance of society which is only rewarded by reject ion. Again, this seemingly perfect man is ineffectual to provide her with emotional support or security. Her disillusion return drives home the point that there is no escape route left available for her.\r\nThe point of concern becomes the fact that though Savitri is an economically self-directed woman, her means of ‘escape’ from the house is linked to a man. Savitri, in her search for the â€Å"complete man” speaks in the talking to of patriarchy, as the concept of ‘masculinity’ is a derivative of society. Even though she is a ‘modern, independent’ woman, she is unable to cut off the suffocating patriarchal bonds of the environment in which she lives.\r\nThe Fourth Man, Juneja is introduced onto the dot somewhat this point. He gains the sympathy of the audience by video display kindness towards Kinni, a character who is almost dead neglected in the play. He comes as a voice of rationality; as an almost omniscient character. He se ems to have intimate knowledge of both Savitri and Mahendranath, as well as their circumstances. His seems to be the communicate authorial voice in the play. His looks and manner of speech is structured so as to make the audience favor his point-of-view and assessment of character.\r\nJuneja espouses the belief that to Savitri the meaning of lifetime is â€Å"how many different things you can have and esteem at the same time.” He lays the blame for the real situation of hopelessness squarely on her shoulder and her quest for the â€Å"complete man”. According to him the problem is not a social reality, but preferably lies in the psychological realm. All of the men she encounters are incomplete and therefore her solution is multiplicity. Her way of filling her void is â€Å"excess”. And she is only attracted to men because, â€Å"they are not Mahendra.” According to Juneja, if she had married one of the men whom she is attracted to she would have st ill felt she had married the wrong man.\r\nJuneja brings in another element of unrealism by accurately recounting the encounter between Jagmohan and Savitri because â€Å"in his place I would have said the same”. Once again this brings forth the ‘sameness’ of these characters, as Juneja’s claim is validated by Savitri’s shattering realization- â€Å"All of you… every(prenominal) one of you…all alike! Exactly the same. Different masks, but the face…? The same wretched face…every star one of you!”\r\nThe tragedy of the realization is heightened by Juneja’s ruthless perusal- â€Å"And yet you felt you had a choice…? Was there really any choice? see to it me, was there?”\r\nIn the above dialogues lies the greatest meaning of that particular theatrical device. It brings out a clear dichotomy between the ideal and the real. What Savitri has been pursuing all along, the ‘ideal man’ does not in fact exist. The notion of her having had a ‘choice’ has been illusory all along; she is trapped in a world with no exit. The play shifts focus to lack of granting immunity for a female in urban, middle-class India. The tragedy is that Juneja’s speech provides a dual diaphragm for Savitri; both in her search for the ‘perfect’ man who can â€Å"fill her void”, as well as an acknowledgment that she shall never gain satisfaction, and colligate to that, happiness.\r\nIn naturalism, free will is not denied but is contained and confined within the environment in which the individual lives. Savitri’s free will is her ability to strike but the fulfillment of that choice depends on the context. Her freedom is linked to a man. She is free to choose which man, but it has to be a man. The illusion of choice arises from the four men and her ‘independence’ is related to shifting from one man to the other.\r\nIn the prologue, the Ma n in the Black Suit had asked the existentialist question of ‘who am I’. This is now problematized, as the dramatic innovation of using the same man for multiple characters casts doubt on whether there is an ‘I’ at all. ‘I’ refers to individuality, the existence of a self different from the ‘other’, a projection that the men in the play are all different which is negated through Juneja’s speech. Savitri uses the address of social realism to justify her belief that she moves on to other men because Mahendra is not the right man. Juneja uses the lecture of absurdism to articulate that there is no ‘right man’; her search is futile because such a man does not exist. All the men in her life are essentially the same man and can only take her for a limited plosive of time.\r\nSurprisingly, the text does not lead up to its realist conclusion; that she is trapped because of the prohibitions of the society in which sh e lives, a world in which a woman has no choice in her own destiny. It, in fact, veers from its apparent initial realist stance of ‘all men are the same in a patriarchy’ and seems to point that all men are the same only to Savitri. Halfway House has often been described as a woman-centric misogynistic play. â€Å"Even as the play builds up a dark vision of trapped humanity, it weakens the force of its statement by simultaneously cutting Savitri’s credentials.” (Nita Kumar). The play does not imply that if the only conditions were different or could be changed then Savitri would be able to escape from the ‘trap’, instead her sexuality is morally condemned, she ought not be able to escape.\r\nJuneja contends that all the men who had come into her life were different. They were individuals with their own diverse characteristics and, according to critic Veena Das, what made Savitri see them as parts of the same fractioned entities was her own â⠂¬Å"diseased imagination”. Juneja, in saying that all men are the same, is trying to define the essential genius of desire. Desire is always in excess of the individual and can never be completely satiated. The frightening aspect of desire lies in its limitlessness. All men are the same because they are looked at through Savitri’s desire, the fact that they will all eventually be unable to satisfy her is the reason for their ‘sameness’. Their amorphousness derives from the fact that they change in accordance with Savitri’s assessment of them. The transcendental nature of desire will always make her move on to other men and search for completeness. It seems to suggest that every being is half-incomplete, it is not a tragedy, but rather a fact of existence, and Savitri, in her search for masculine perfection and inability to accept this fact, is herself responsible for her ruination.\r\nUnexpectedly again, the play doesn’t build up even to the absurdist conclusion; it does not suggest that everybody in essentiality is like Savitri, because desire is universal, exceeding every individual. Instead, the elements of Naturalism as well as Absurdism are developed only to lay the blame on Savitri’s inherent nature, which is considered responsible for the destruction of this particular family. She stands the last accused and the play ends before there can be any possibility of falsifying on her behalf.\r\nInterestingly, though certain relationships in life are deterministic, including that of a mother-daughter, sister-brother, etc, the same cannot be said about spouses; however, in this very context the language used by Juneja is the final language of containment, of absolute, wet determinism. As earlier mentioned, the device of one man playing multiple roles is that of the actor and is not available to the character, and therefore it is significant that the visual of the play itself shows that naught can be changed. J uneja’s speech corresponds to the structure of the play, which has to come from without and therefore indicates a concurrence with the playwright’s view.\r\nAccording to critic Kirti Jain, this device loses a little of its relevance in the actual stage performance as the focus of the audience is bony primarily towards the clothes, mannerisms and voice of that one actor rather than the thematic import. However, there is no ambiguity on the fact that the nature of the play cannot be understand without a reference to this particular device. Through this, the electron orbit of thrust changes entirely from the ‘universality of human experience’, and the ultimate censure is not of society, or even the circumstances, but rather of Savitri’s desiring nature. Her lack of constraint and implicit sexuality stand accused as the essential reasons for what makes her home an incomplete, halfway house.\r\n'