Jacob Marley’s Chains and Jacob McHardy

Props in an Indian school play and the art teacher who made them.

I have seen Chittaranjan and Maligaon India kids who go to, and get into, some trouble for props for skits.

Sometimes, a student paints a zebra crossing. Other times, a student uses intrepid ingenuity to get motorcycle handlebars for his play. Once, a student in a borrowed Sister’s habit was in a play. These stories are over thirty five years old, and now India is different.

Props are managed professionally and the kids are free to learn their lines and act them out.

The annual school play involved all the teachers, but this story is about Jacob Marley’s chains, made by art teacher Jacob McHardy.

Those bricks and chains were made with thermocole and plaster of Paris. The child who plays Marley was able to walk around pretending they were heavy, and Marley makes Scrooge shudder.

This is the character Jacob Marley up close after make up. I am sharing the picture though the kid is below 18 because the child looks nothing like this character. His own mother wouldn’t know him. (Actually, she didn’t)

Marley’s chains weren’t too tough for Jacob McHardy, because he’s a past master at working with all forms of art, like the clay modeling work above.

The decorations we saw when we entered the school made us feel very blessed to be part of such a show.

Indian parents haven’t grown up seeing shows where a dedicated art teacher, or a choreographer or a lights person was handling the effects. It took our collective breath away.

The handcrafted chains, stood out for me because chains of that thickness, if in iron, would be too heavy for a child to drag.

The motion of the child across the stage made it very clear that the art teacher’s solution worked. It was artistic to the engineer, and frightening to the playgoer (excluding the ones like me who were wondering how Jacob sir did it)

Our school plays never had real costumes like the ones these kids are wearing. Nor did we have props like the Santa Sled, a thermocole and plaster creation from a local art shop in Sakchi, Tatanagar.

The most we’d have was children wearing adult clothes rolled up at the pants leg, or a little girl in a saree pretending to be the mother of her smaller-bodied classmate. Plays or acts which didn’t demand props were picked.

With a structured story like A Christmas Carol, with Scrooge’s tombstone and Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, there was no such leeway. The play would have been a washout without those props and the body paint some of the kids wore.

The audience can’t be expected to imagine everything.

When you see India, every shop and every corner, every school on every day, will look different at different points in time. We’re so used to changes we don’t even notice most of them.

We take people like Jacob McHardy as a given! Here’s some of his other work.

By Tooth Truth Roopa Vikesh