The timing for a play about the inter-racial tensions in Sri Lanka, is perfect.

Sugu Pillay could not have known about the assassination attempt on the cricket team when she booked her play into Bats for March 2009. In fact she started work on Serendipity back in 2004, the programme tells us, in an effort to understand her parents’ homeland.

"Everyone has a cause. Every cause is right…"

This play also looks at how ordinary, good people can do inhumane things and justify their actions. You don’t need to directly take a life to be a killer. Following on in a way from Kia Ora Khalid last week, there is an examination of New Zealand as a multicultural country and the imperative on migrants to fit it while not turning their backs on their home countries.

Malini (Ban Abdul) is a firebrand, just returned to New Zealand for her baby sister’s wedding. She fled a personal tragedy, but the decision she made in terms of where to go and what to do, is extreme. Ramalingam Iyer (Tony Hopkins) has been invited to New Zealand but he constantly wishes he had died along with his son in Sri Lanka.

Several sets of knowledgeable eyes have seen the script during its long and workshopped development and it’s directed by the experienced Bronwyn Tweddle. It stars the fantastic Abdul.

But Serendipity does not live up to its name. At 90 minutes it’s far too long, giving the sense that the writer is throwing all her research into the piece rather than focusing on a central story. The acting is stilted and the direction awkward, making it uncomfortable to watch.

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Somewhere in the muddle that is Serendipity there is a play struggling to get out. The play grew out of the playwright’s need to understand the inter-racial tensions in Sri Lanka where her parents were born. It is also about inter-racial tensions in New Zealand between the central character, Malini, a Sri Lankan New Zealander and Jeff, her Māori partner, whom she deserted when she returned to Sri Lanka to join the Tamil Tigers.

A programme note awkwardly describes all this as ‘the problematisation of identity in terms of ethnic and cultural boundaries’. But the play is also about how the tentacles of a faraway war entangle people in New Zealand and how love can evolve into hatred, fanaticism, and revenge even at a wedding in a peaceful backwater like Christchurch where it all takes place, apart from a scene in the Sri Lankan jungle.

A Hindu priest has been brought over from Sri Lanka to officiate at Malini’s sister’s arranged wedding. He is haunted by the abduction of his 13 year old son by the Tamil Tigers. He immediately recognizes Malini as having fought with the Tamil Tigers and was probably the person who ‘recruited’ his son. The long arm of coincidence is stretched too far, and it is stretched even further still in the final scene when Jeff reveals to Malini the truth about what happened years before.

Serendipity is a disjointed play with a mix of theatrical styles, clumsily structured scenes, and some ‘poetic’ moments that sit uneasily amongst the scenes that are melodramatic and on one occasion unintentionally funny.

The production hasn’t helped at all what with two lengthy scene changes and some very odd movements by Jeff and Malini in their opening scene which has them moving like robots with no relation to what is being said. In the jungle scene two female Tamil Tiger fighters attack Malini for not being fanatical enough and they all bob up and down like jack-in-the-boxes. Maybe it was the heat or the insects.

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It is entirely possible that this first play by Sugu Pillay is a good one but its premiere production directed by Bronwyn Tweddle falls far short of revealing its potential.

In a majority of scenes, something in the rehearsal process – directorially imposed, we must assume – has resulted in the actors taking short sharp walks in random directions while delivering their lines, often ending up in awkward physical relationships with each other and always distracting us from the content of their dialogue, let alone the import of the scene. It is intrusive, subversive and finally abusive of the play’s presumed purpose.

Only Ban Abdul (the most trained and experienced actor in the cast of seven) transcends the superficiality of this irrelevant nonsense to give a comparatively credible performance as Malini, a Sri Lankan immigrant who, after a miscarriage and rejection by her father, ran away from NZ and her Mâori partner Jeff (I kid you not: ‘Jeff da Mâori’, played by Waylon Edwards). Now, 13 years later, she has returned for the arranged marriage of her sister Shoba (Aneela Pancha).

Flown in to officiate is Hindu priest Ramalingam Iyer (Tony Hopkins) who is befriended by Tom (Mark Venning-Slater), a workman who went to school with Shoba and is really a Political Science student wanting research material for his dissertation. His contrived, erratic movements, however, make him more a candidate for ADD diagnosis than a PhD.

The priest is emotively haunted by the ‘taking’ of his son back home. It turns out Malina joined the Tamil Tigers and recruited children to join their revolution. And unaccountably Ramalingam, who has only had eye-witness accounts of his son’s alleged abduction, instantly recognises Malina as the perpetrator* and threatens to kill her ("I will kill you!" – another homage to Bro Town and earlier Naked Samonas shows?). He goes into a trance, becomes imbued with great physical strength, assaults her with a stone slab and puts her in hospital with a broken leg and injured shoulder.  

When he does the trance thing again, "ohmmm"-ing his way to the hospital, the hoped-for dramatic tension simply elicits giggles from a patient audience attempting to give it all the benefit of their increasing doubts. Yet it is only when Ramalingam is thus possessed that Hopkins stops giving the impression he is trying to remember his lines and fully inhabits his role.

I suppose Jeff’s knee-jerk desire to kill Ramalingam is – along with Malini’s rejection by her father and Ramalingam’s loss of his son – an attempt to show how easily love flips over into hatred; how close to the surface the human impulse for violent retribution is, despite the obvious truth that far from resolving anything it will only make matters worse.

Given the ubiquity of these truisms, and their exploration here in the context of culture-clash and inter-racial tensions both within New Zealand and in Sri Lanka, the play clearly cries out for a judicious fusion of cultural and theatrical conventions. Instead we get a poorly executed mishmash of styles than makes the dramaturgy look clumsy.

Especially cringe-worthy is a scene involving Black Tamil ‘torpedo women’ in the jungle, whose over-the-top hate-filled dialogue is robbed of any potential for drama when the actors are obliged to bob up when talking and down when not. Someone please explain. Even better: justify.

Only sometimes, when Ban Abdul compels me to believe in Malini, am I drawn into the story. The rest of the time I am painfully aware of being stuck in a theatre, feeling variously uninvited, patronised, insulted, bored and finally – after 90 minutes, interrupted only by two interminable scene changes – grumpy.
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*(When in doubt, consider the title. Serendipity is derived from Serendib, the Arab name for Sri Lanka. Usually reserved for pleasant accidental discoveries, I can only assume it refers ironically, here, to the less-than-serendipitous coincidence of Ramalingam and Malini both turning up at a wedding in NZ.)

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