Thoughts on Off Centre

This is just a personal entry so this isn't some official or unofficial review on the play.

I don't usually watch plays and I made this an exception due to the theme itself as I went to watch the play with my friend yesterday. I enjoyed the play a lot, the play lasted 1 hour 50 minutes, but I could have easily continued watching it for another 1 or 2 hours. Perhaps it's due to the fact that the theme is close to my heart, yet, without a realistic protrayal of the social situation and connection I could feel with the characters themselves, how would I have been able to enjoy it so.

While watching the show, I dare say a tinge of sadness and pain was felt because I know for myself how true and real the prejudices and the emotional and mental confilcts, and more importantly the struggles and fears that the characters face, for in the 2 characters Vinod and Saloma, I also see in them the cries and faces of some people that I know.

Vinod protrayed just how what depression supposedly is, "anger turned inward." His anger and frustrations, hidden in his fears. The seemingly stable but yet more fragile than the very girl he tried to befriend

Saloma on the other hand outwardly looks mentally and emotionally frail, yet in her, I see the courage and strength that she has deep down. Just like a friend of mine that I know who also suffers from schizophrenia coincidentally.

Emily, Saloma's friend in the play, despite how the character's manner of talking is understandably funny to most public, it brings about a sense of sadness again knowing that people like Emily truly do believe what they say and think. Delusions of grandeur.. bipolar disorder if im not mistaken.

There are several other characters I enjoyed watching in the play, among them would be Vinod's platoon seargant (not the captain mind you) who protrayed just how their fellow peers are also in a state of helplessness themselves, unable to rise against those above them in rank in the army, and not knowing how to truly help people like Vinod.

It thoroughly annoyed my friend and I that some people in the audience were constantly laughing, annoyed in the sense that I feel sad for these people in the audience who despite seeing the play, is clearly completely out of touch and unable to connect with the depth of pain and struggles the characters are going through.

I saw and recognised in the play, the loving yet denial state and lack of understanding parents some mental illness sufferers had to face, the harshness of NS which so often lacks a human heart, the fears and struggles mental illness sufferers go through, the fear and prejudice of the majority public, and the co-dependent but genuine friendship that Vinod and Saloma share. In their friendship, I saw the neediness of both, and in the progress, the abandonment and fearful feelings that Vinod must have felt.

At the end of the play, Saloma sitting there, to me protrayed the aloneness that mental illness sufferers face, and how we could all so easily take the time not to judge and be there with them and that alone could have helped and meant so much to them. We are all too busy as Saloma puts it, too busy with our lives, unable to spend a moment to care. I sat there with my friend watching the audience depart at the end of the play with Saloma sitting there waving goodbye, and I wonder, just how much did the audience truly understand what Vinod and Saloma (and all the other mental illness sufferers out there) had to go through.