Murderers confess their crimes in play inspired by 1960s radio series

A cult leader. A man who hears voices in his head. A woman who watches people starve in a dungeon.

These are some of the murderous characters at the heart of Grace Kalaiselvi's Marma Medai - Theerppu (The Judgement), a new play inspired by characters from a 1960s Tamil radio series by M.K. Narayanan.

Kalaiselvi, 44, is too young to have listened to the popular whodunnit when it launched on the airwaves. But she recalls her mother telling her it was "very frightening".

"The sounds were very eerie. A lot of people thought they were ghost stories. But they were actually suspense, thriller, mystery," says the theatre-maker in a video call.

"There were a lot of murders, smuggling - always dark subjects. I was more attracted to the killers for some reason," says Kalaiselvi, who read the plays after she was invited by The Esplanade to direct a show based on them.

Her play runs from Nov 26 to 28 at Kalaa Utsavam - Indian Festival of Arts and concerns itself with five murderers, who are played by Gayathri Segaran, Indumathi Tamilselvan, Karthikeyan Somasundaram, Pramila Krishnasamy and Rebekah Sangeetha Dorai.

Clad in uniform-like attire, they wake up in a strange place with no exit. One of them (played by Dorai) is a "space controller" who forces the others to confess their crimes.

Kalaiselvi says: "Are they in a hospital, an asylum, a police station, an interrogation room? It's up to the audience to decide. There will be a sense of mystery because the characters do not know where they are, and they are being tormented in this space."

The production is performed in Tamil with English surtitles.

It unfolds in a minimalist set and is heavy on movement - Dorai's character, for instance, will engage in Noh-like motions. There will also be multimedia by acclaimed film-maker K. Rajagopal, featuring film recordings, animations and old articles.

"The actors are tired," says Kalaiselvi with a laugh. "They are moving non-stop from the beginning to the end of the play. I made the lines as minimal as possible. Instead, I gave them more movement-based stuff - there's a lot for them to memorise, in terms of how many counts, how many steps."

Despite the dark subject matter, there has been a lot of laughter on the set, she adds.

"I tell them - laugh as much as you want in the rehearsal, but at the end of the day, the audience should be feeling the fear and the suspense."

WHERE Esplanade Theatre Studio, 1 Esplanade Drive

WHEN Nov 26, 8pm; Nov 27 and 28, 3 and 8pm

ADMISSION $30 from Sistic (call 6348-5555 or go to www.sistic.com.sg)

INFO Go to str.sg/3pbX. Performed in Tamil with English surtitles