BORING ADVICE

DIRECTED BY EDWARD MORGAN

STARRING: JOHN KISHLINE, DEBORAH CLIFTON, KRITI PANT and EDWARD MORGAN

‘Success’ is 75 minutes of ad-man Rick Starling’s life – most of which you would sleep through. I did. Is it a distinction if a play deliberately doesn’t aspire to be engaging? I was wide awake through the lengths of ‘Gerry’; I even liked it. It’s one thing to be lifelike, it’s another to be in slow-motion. In that way, if Gus Van Sant’s film was ‘Waiting for Godot’ kind of absurdist, ‘Success’ is just plain absurd. It doesn’t seek your attention – it tests it. A champion concept if completely unsound, but the play doesn’t boast of a void. It’s half-empty at best, of inept experimentation.

“Some calls had to be taken”, Rick says to Aaliyah Nagir; she responds saying, “and some had to be made, I understand.” I don’t. Rick spends half the play on phone conversations, only one side of which we get to hear. He doesn’t look hectic or overindulgent – he says he wants more, but it doesn’t sound like he means it. He isn’t an Anthony Montana or a Gordon Gekko – he just acts like one and badly at that. It would be a different story if the effect was intentional, but the whole concept of the play works against that satirical note. It’s supposed to be a morality question. We think of films that have asked the same – ‘Network’, ‘Wall Street’, ‘the Devil’s Advocate’ – the list is endless. What had contributed to their acclaim were their unique abilities to engage the audience with their concept. But ‘Success’ seemed entirely disinterested to even remotely attempt that. It’s boring advice – how does it matter if it’s good?

Actress Deborah Clifton, as the mysterious Ms. Nagir, isn’t quite there with her Egyptian accent, which the ad-executive Mr. Starling (John Kishline, also Ms. Clifton’s real-life husband) points out. She says she attended college at the University of Wisconsin. I remembered a similar scenario in ‘Before Sunrise’, which was about ‘prowess in English’ than an ‘accent’. Here it seems more like an excuse for bad acting. The play succumbs to the slightest of logic. And I wonder what ‘Success’ it swapped that failure for. 

(I know the tag says 'I'm Out of Here!' but in reality, I sat through the whole length of the play. Except I was asleep for most parts, as is made evident right in the beginning)

A CHILLING EXPERIENCE, ACTED OUT

DIRECTED BY TRACY HOLSINGER

STARRING: TEHANI CHITTY, THUSHARA HETTIHAMU, SUBHA WIJESIRIWARDENA, RUVIN DE SILVA, BRANDON INGRAM, TRACY JAYASINGHE, PRASAD PEREIRA, NUZRETH JALALDEEN and TRACY HOLSINGER

How do you elaborate in a thousand words what the play encapsulated in three? ‘the Travelling Circus’ is brilliantly named, neatly choreographed and is sincere enough with its emotions. It enlarges Mike Masilamani’s quirky little story called ‘the Boy who Spoke in Numbers’ to fit the estranging motifs of a Brechtian play. It’s a street demonstration on stage where technology adds to the impact – we have shrieks and booms and magnified voices, monotones and back-projections in a sort of augmented reality in which the play finds nourishment. It’s too sensitive to be questioned, more so when it laughs at itself, where it surprises you with sparks of wit and irony. It’s like an Awareness Campaign that scores with heart armed by concept, but it scores points for conception on its own as well. There are moments when you’re truly touched, there are those when you can’t help but laugh out loud. And in the end you find you can’t get past the plight it depicts, in a bittersweet realization.

Two things – two distinctively singular sequences that, I felt, lifted the play. One where the play’s central theme of being ‘caught in the crossfire’ is made literal and the other, a scatter of lines here and there with which the characters narrate the trauma of their fictionalized lives. It’s slightly disappointing that ‘the Travelling Circus’ doesn’t take a side in Sri Lanka’s Civil war, but that’s only because it doesn’t want to. It voices the ‘Internally Displaced’ – Ignorant Defeated, it calls them. They’re refugees in their own country, subjugated and thrust with authority that’s plainly unwelcome. Soldiers in a war they don’t accept, their hope is deceptive, their fates unkind. And you’re made to wonder what’s more horrific about what you see – the situation of these people, or the fact that they’re having to reconcile with it.

Yet, the play is diplomatic – in the sense that it’s clear it’s a play. The characters have no names, they’re all ‘Boy’ and ‘Cow’ and ‘Kind Aunty’ and ‘Madam’. Sometimes the actors are emotionally absorbed into the premise, sometimes they stick out with acting performances. They speak in an English that’s hard to place, most of it predominantly of an obvious British tongue. We know the actors are Sinhalese, but the same cannot be said about their characters. Perhaps the play intends to be secular, perhaps it’s content with depicting one side of a story that deems itself sad. For all we know, the other side could be worse. It IS worse, as a matter of fact. But those horrors are skated upon in a whirlwind of dates and statistical data in the numbers that the Boy recites. The numbers are the heart of the play and they, in turn, are largely unclear. And the play then closes, hinting at a future Sri Lanka inspired and governed by those events and incidents that threatened to thwart its integrity. A rather soft ending, I should say.

‘the Travelling Circus’ is a people’s play and not a political play. It offers solace, not a solution. It’s an hour of substantial sympathy and empathy, from housewives to housewives who are going through worse; from Mothers to Mothers as they shudder in fear and from boys to boys, shell-shocked. It scores with self-empowerment, although it retracts to passiveness at times. And I repeat: It is NOT a political play. To call it one would deem it unworthy of the praise it receives, and I want to praise it. It’s an engaging play, a single tragic fable presented with quirks that make it both likeable and strong. Hence, it is but my sincere request to all alike: Please do not call it political. There’s nothing ‘political’ about human suffering, right from Joan of Arc to little Anne Frank and the Holocausts. And there’s nothing political about ‘the Travelling Circus’ either. It’s a reflection of an incorrigible human nature which consumes its own kind. A chilling experience, acted out – methodically, and sometimes strikingly so.

APPLICANT STATUS: ---UNDER REVIEW---

DIRECTED BY AKARSH KHURANA

STARRING: KARAN PANDIT, KASHIN SHETTY, ADHIR BHAT and PRERNA CHAWLA

I thought ‘the Interview’ would go on to be an “it’s so mean it’s actually funny” sort of dark comedy, but it arrested that thought by showing some soul towards the end. I was confused. I chanced to ask this question to director Akarsh Khurana himself, who was kind enough to spare a few minutes for a little chat we shared. But I found his answer unconvincing. He said the sensitivity of their play (written by Siddharth Kumar) depended on the sensitivity of the audience – if we wanted the Boss to be ruthless, he would be, and if we wanted sensitivity then we have that too. A typical entertainer’s answer from a person who doesn’t deny he’s one. I appreciated his honesty but it doesn’t save his play, which is either a painful intrusion of emotions in a laugh riot, or an injection of humour in a social drama, both distinctively spelling ‘half-baked’. On the one hand, it tries to be as crushing as a Coen-invention like ‘A Serious Man’, on the other it takes off in an ‘Up in the Air’ sort of soul-search. I wished I could laugh it off, but then it slapped me with a moral responsibility to take it seriously. I couldn’t decide.

Let this not be mistaken for rawness, even though the play did have ample amounts of it. The presentation was raw, its concept not so. We don’t get to know what happens off-stage, it’s but our own crude extrapolation that we’re entitled to. The interview in itself is obscure, we don’t know who is interviewing who for what post in which corporation. The most we get thrown in are words like ‘Middle Management’, sufficient to define the scenario to a fair level of precision. We have a candidate who has been Boss as well as Employee, set to continue doing the same. There’s his superior in Keith who views him as a potential threat, a pawn moved against his own corporate status. And ultimately, we have the ‘Boss’ as part of an elaborate Good-Cop-Bad-Cop routine with the occasional turn of table. To add to this, there’s also a Secretary who plays both cause and effect in a distorted centre of attention.

The Interviewee corners his bosses, the ‘played’ gets to play back. We delve into fantasy in a flesh-and-blood guise – there simply can’t be a soft ending. The play takes a sensitized turn; a downgrade for the sake of subsequent climactic peak. And the ending isn’t ‘crushing’ or ‘horribly funny’, it’s just wrong. The characters have their catharses – the ‘Candidate’ in the fact that he’s getting a job, Keith because he’s finally getting his promotion, and the ‘Boss’ because his problem is ‘fixed’ as Keith puts it. The Secretary, on her part, finds the highest form of peace. The problem here is that I was denied mine.

I liked how the Candidate reveals to his Boss that he’s about to marry the woman he once molested. I hated how the Boss responds with a similar story of his own. Bosses don't respond to subordinates, they Boss them! And I liked the sigh of relief as the Candidate breathes an “I got the job!” to his fiancée, but I hated the intersperse of sensitivity between bouts of indifference. It’s like our characters ‘reconcile’ into who they are as opposed to being themselves – a contradiction to corporate mentality. I felt as though Siddharth Kumar was prepared to do anything to reap his share of laughs – a trait I empathized with, the sloppy debut that I’ve been through as a playwright. I liked every imperfection of the play in form of premise and presentation, how actors, as characters, fidgeted when inactive; how their exits were announced but not explained. The play stuck religiously to its sequences, its back-stories giving scope for conscious and unconscious imagination – I liked that.

But then I hated how it got so carried away with its own pet concept, much like how I did. Well, what can I say? I am self-critical. Even more so when I find my flaws manifested in someone else, where I don’t have to go easy on them. This ‘Interview’ brought out the Boss in me. And I don’t fire it altogether for that, but I strongly maintain that I expected something more. It’s an Upper Management thing.

A SHIRK OF 'NECESSITY' AGAINST 'DEMAND'

DIRECTED BY PRASHANT PRAKASH and NAYANTARA KOTIAN

STARRING: KALKI KOECHLIN, NEIL BHOOPALAM, GULSHAN DEVIAH, SUHAAS AHUJA, PRERNA CHAWLA, RATNABALI BHATTACHARJEE, VIVEK GOMBER and PRASHANT PRAKASH

Tom Stoppard slaps convention and kills critics with ‘the Real Inspector Hound’. It’s perhaps a mark of who he hates more. Or perhaps not. I’ve always been biased against parodies for the simple reason that I believe they try to play to two different audiences. It’s like how Zack Brown remarks with the intonation of Kevin Smith in ‘Zack and Miri make a Porno’ on how their ‘Star Wh*res’ would cater to both Star Wars nerds as well as those who consume porn in general. Writers have forever leeched upon this thin line separating a satire from a tribute. And in that context, ‘the Real Inspector Hound’, I thought, liked what it scorned, though there were times when it dared to differ.

Two critics discuss a play in progress. One of them gets to be cozy with the fresh faces, the other is still an understudy and laments about it. The two then proceed on separate streams, often crisscrossing in conversation. The former fantasizes about the actress, the latter strays to places sinister. Tom Stoppard deems one critic an infidel and the other a would-be murderer found guilty in intention. Playwrights shall be overjoyed by this concept, critics would arm their fortresses with tongue-in-cheek. Either way, our critics (in the play) then step into the play-within-the-play one after the other, a ‘whodunnit’ that ties both worlds together. And they find themselves confronted by characters than actors in a recurring sequence such that they know what’s happening and yet fulfill the pre-destined plot.

The play-within-the-play goes into a lull when the critics speak, the critics in turn don’t raise a word when a scene is in progress. They’re an orthodox audience at a conventional play. They don’t interject – they summarize. And they succumb where Stoppard wants them to. Yet, ironically, it’s a critic who has the last laugh and snares the effervescent Cynthia (Kalki Koechlin). Maybe that’s indicative of his favouritism towards a select few. Maybe not. I would never know.

Kalki Koechlin reminds me too much of Eva Green. They’re both French, they’re both petite and graceful, sexy and mature, and they both smoke like kettles! This is a dangerous comparison, however, for it throws Koechlin in brighter light than she warrants for. Nevertheless, she’s fairly eye-capturing and her performance effortlessly outclasses the rest, who are more about fake accents and impersonations. There’s barely scope for directorial credit (or set design) either, lest one ought to throw accolades for not destroying the integrity of the play. But the actors did have good comic timing, consistency and stage presence. They kept the play alive and managed to get all their jokes through to the audience. Neat, but doesn't knock you out. Still commendable, right?

The Q&A session after the play had an Elderly enthusiast ask the cast and crew as to why they didn’t ‘Indianize’ the play. I had an even more fundamental question – why perform this in the first place? ‘the Real Inspector Hound’ was a British play written in 1962, while both Prashant as well as Kalki have ‘proven their ability’ in writing their own draft (‘the Skeleton Woman’). It’s an Indian Theatre Festival in 2011 that features foreign plays as well – where’s the burning need to adapt? Just a thought that irked after an entertaining performance. I shall let you ponder upon it, if you would.

THIS DUCK IS LAME!

DIRECTED BY KARTHIK KUMAR

STARRING: T.M. KARTHIK SRINIVASAN, YUDHISHTHIR RANA, ANIL SRINIVASAN, ANISHA SARAH VARGHESE and KARTHIK KUMAR

‘Chasing my Mamet Duck’ takes from David Mamet’s ‘Duck Variations’ as far as its premise goes. It’s about two guys who sit on a bench and philosophize about ducks, drawing parallels where they can. I was reminded of the scene in Gus Van Sant’s ‘Good Will Hunting’ where Will Hunting (Matt Damon) asks his therapist Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) if the ducks were some sort of fetish in a ‘taster’s choice moment between guys’. While that sequence went on to prove him wrong, ‘Chasing my Mamet Duck’ did nothing to bust an existing conviction of mine – that I was about to watch a bunch of people try too hard. The conversations were stressful, even though the scenarios turned out to be pretty inventive. The setup and performances helped raise a few laughs while the dialogue turned it to a grimace. I wish Indian (English) theatre wouldn’t try to emulate its Western counterpart. It’s like the duck that tries to fly with its wings clipped – it falls too hard.

The play featured three motifs. One was director Karthik Kumar ‘breaking the Fourth wall’ carrying out overwrought audience-interactions. The second is a duo in different scenarios, belting different forms and structures of ‘Mamet-speak’ (a form of dialogue popularized by the American playwright). Thirdly, we had a couple of video clips which tended to not only disrupt the actual flow of the play, but also destroyed its idea as a whole. It’s one thing to reveal the concept, it’s another to just throw it away. ‘Chasing my Mamet Duck’ did exactly the latter and seemed happy to do so. To add to this, we had pianist Anil Srinivasan fill in with interludes that got redundant after a while – the play crossed the delicate balance between adequacy in music and an over-score. He had me wishing for that elusive silence that the play began with – something that was harder to get than the fact that ‘the Hindu’ actually included this play in its Theater Fest roster.

Nevertheless, the play was verbose despite its share of glitches (like using ‘seeked’ instead of ‘sought’ and ‘juxtapositioning’ instead of ‘juxtaposing’). It was, in a teeny-tiny little way, a fair bit of fun; the no-brainer kind of fun. The audience, for most part, would not have understood what was going on. I myself had a pair of neighbours who were busy texting on their mobiles, even at the time they were not asked to do so – let me not get down to telling you any more about them. The runtime was too much given the lack of substance, which diluted it even further. Still, it had a fairly continuous narrative that seemed well-motivated, at least until Karthik started pleading with ‘fifteen more minutes of patience’ and then ‘ten more minutes’, consuming a half-hour in that process. That too for sequences which weren’t worth the stretch and served to distort the whole idea of the play. It’s like we walked into a public service announcement – nothing could make it more pretentious.

‘Chasing my Mamet Duck’ takes a whole, flawless, magnificent Duck and breaks it to chunks with a crucial lot missing. The whole point of it, in short. And It then proclaims vegetarianism. Of course, I speak in metaphors – after all, I did sit through a 'child's play' that liked to call itself smart.