boy decides to jump onto it. He takes a long walk away from the throne, comes back running towards it and jumps. While this is going on in the forefront the boy's mother comes looking for him, finds him attempting this impossible task, stops and hides behind a pillar, and starts praying to the almighty that he might succeed. The boy happens to be the heir apparent to the throne. He does not succeed in climbing onto the throne. In actuality also the boy later in the play falls prey to palace intrigues and dies very early in his life, having become addicted to drugs and sexual degradation. The strength of the scene lies not just in the power of the imagery itself but the mastery with which it is constructed. The words are spoken by the mother while the action takes place in the forefront. The eerie atmosphere of the dusty hall provides a terrifying background to the scene. Sam-sa's plays are full of such dramatic imagery. It is surprising to find such a powerful playwright emerging in a period when there was hardly any good theatre happening around him. But because of the unevenness and in some places incompleteness of his plays he is hardly performed and is very little discussed. A re-valuation ofSamsa and a re-publication of his plays after they are treated for the flaws would certainly be of great consequence. In Kailasam one sees a contradictory pull operating. He scrupulously tries to project himself in the image of a bohemian. But deep down the strong bonds ofbrahminical culture remained in him. In an article he jokingly calls himself a black dot in the white house, the reference being to the palatial building his father, a high court judge and a great Sanskrit scholar^iad built. He tried to reject his upbringing and project himself as a disorganized vagabond. He used to drink and keep highly irregular hours. At the level of a practising playwright this tension between the traditional high culture and the modem mind shows up in a different manner. It takes the shape of a contradiction between archetypal characterization and realistic portrayal. Kailasam's characters are outwardly real persons, but inwardly they represent an archetypal prototype. One of his famous characters is a naughty young boy scout named Kitty, short for Krishna. Like the cowherd Krishna, this boy is also good at heart but not very bright in studies, naughty but bestowed with an extraordinary virtue. His other famous characters likeAhoblu mHomeRule and the prostitute in Soole also show similar traits, Kailasam loved writing plays with archetypal characters and situations. But because he was committed to fighting the decadent plays used by theatre companies he only wrote naturalist plays with realistic dialogues in Kannada. Whenever he felt like writing other kinds of plays he used to switch over to English. He has written English plays on mythological characters like Kama, Ekalavya and others, in which he uses a highly formal language. To be the first person trying an altogether new form of theatre, was too much of a burden on Kailasam's creativity. One gets the feeling that had he had a predecessor writing plays in the new style Kailasam would have happily settled Journal of Arts & Ideas 121