Page 84 - Forbes - India (January 2020)

ForbesLife interview

‘We use stereotypes and

then tear them apart’

British theatre director Melly Still talks about the need to
reimagine Agatha Christie for an Indian audience

By KathaKali Chanda

ritish director-choreographer Melly Still lens of what it’s like to be a woman. All of Christie’s
was never a big fan of Agatha Christie in women characters are trying to deal with what it
her youth till she was offered to direct means to be slightly marginalised. But it’s done in
a production of The Mirror Crack’d quite delicate a manner; she doesn’t shout about it.
B From Side To Side. A re-reading of the And ultimately, she doesn’t judge her characters.
crime fiction writer brought in new perspectives She can be a bit moralistic with the character of
and she jumped on board to direct a production Miss Marple, for example, but if you take that out,
that was adapted for the stage by award-winning the characters are psychologically interesting.
playwright Rachel Wagstaff (who has adapted Paula In this play, Miss Mistry (as Miss Marple is
Hawkins’s The Girl On The Train, among others) called in the adaptation) sees the world from
and co-produced by the Wales Millennium Centre the point of view of how she’s experiencing life,
and Wiltshire Creative. Still is in Mumbai to direct and then through her predicaments she starts to
84 another production of The Mirror Crack’d… re- empathise and understand the characters. In our
contextualised for an Indian audience by writer version, she’s not foolproof; she makes mistakes.
Ayeesha Menon. The play will be staged at the
NCPA in Mumbai between January 30 and February Q the flipside of doing a much-read
9. Still, who has previously directed adaptations of and performed story like the mirror
Louis de Bernières’s Captain Correlli’s Mandolin Crack’d… is that you’ve got to reinvent
and Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, gives it. how did you approach this play?

Forbes India a peek into what to expect from People have When you put up a novel on stage, it can be quite
the staging of Christie’s bestseller, this time set the hunger boring, because two people discussing a plot isn’t
in a sleepy hamlet in Goa. Edited excerpts: for live interesting. Only action is dramatic because it lets
interaction:
Melly Still you see the dynamics between the characters. In
Q despite being set nearly half a century ago and this case, we’ve had to go back and forth in time as
produced multiple times for cinema different characters remember what
and theatre what makes agatha happened. Miss Marple wasn’t there at
Christie’s works interesting even now? the crime scene, so she’s having to put
Christie is brilliant at plots, and people together all the versions of the event.
love a good whodunnit. But what people We are starting to see one particular
don’t talk about much and one of the event subtly shifting through the lenses
problems I have with it is that the of different suspects. We had to find
characters are just so two-dimensional, a way of making it physical. We have
and they are so stereotypical. She was an open stage and a lawn chair for
writing of her times, which means her prop. It’s Miss Marple’s sitting room
attitude to different classes was bigoted but also her mind. Once a character is
at times. I had read all of Christie’s introduced, it stays there somewhere
novels when I was about 12 or 13 and had in the recesses of her mind, hovering
become a bit snobbish about them until until called forward again. With these
this project came up, when I started movements in time and place, it is
reading them again. And what I found quite a dynamic piece of theatre.
interesting is that she writes through the The premise of the piece is

forbes india • january 31, 2020