Magic Moments
A few months after playing an ageing Goan patriarch trying to adjust to changes around the traditional Bandra neighbourhood, in Pereira’s Bakery at 76 Chapel Road, Hidayat Sami goes ahead and plays a seven-year-old kid in Makrand Deshpande’s Time Boy a few months later.
Grown-ups play kids in a lot of productions—casting real kids curtails the life of a play, since they have to go back to school after vacations—but for a six-foot something, strapping guy to convincingly portray a small child requires suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience (many kids among them) and the ability on the part of the actor to make them ignore his appearance and accept him as a seven-year old, which Hidayat manages admirably.
In the play, written by Nivedita Pohankar, Hidayat playing Murli, with a Bengali mother (Pohankar with her near perfect accent) and Malayali father, hates school. His eccentric teacher (Divya Jagdale, overdoing the Kerala accent) doesn’t quite know how to control him. He has two friends, a Punjabi girl, whose pushy-mother (Amruta Mane, hilarious) wants her to be a model, and a tantrum throwing boy, who flings himself on the ground and howls if he disagrees with something (Romi Jaspal, amusing), with whose help he builds a time machine out of a washing machine, so that he can travel to the future and see what he will grow up to be.
The time travel is not the point of the play, however, what comes across is the ease and warmth of the parent-child relationship and friends who support unconditionally. Like most kids, Murli changes his mind, one day he wants to be a politician(with his symbol being a blank piece of paper representing time), next day he wants to be an astronaut.
Without a clear plot, the play coasts along on the sweetness of the relationships and the mischief of the kids, and in the end, perhaps without meaning to, Time Boy says a lot about innocence and the motivating power of dreams.
A few months after playing an ageing Goan patriarch trying to adjust to changes around the traditional Bandra neighbourhood, in Pereira’s Bakery at 76 Chapel Road, Hidayat Sami goes ahead and plays a seven-year-old kid in Makrand Deshpande’s Time Boy a few months later.
Grown-ups play kids in a lot of productions—casting real kids curtails the life of a play, since they have to go back to school after vacations—but for a six-foot something, strapping guy to convincingly portray a small child requires suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience (many kids among them) and the ability on the part of the actor to make them ignore his appearance and accept him as a seven-year old, which Hidayat manages admirably.
In the play, written by Nivedita Pohankar, Hidayat playing Murli, with a Bengali mother (Pohankar with her near perfect accent) and Malayali father, hates school. His eccentric teacher (Divya Jagdale, overdoing the Kerala accent) doesn’t quite know how to control him. He has two friends, a Punjabi girl, whose pushy-mother (Amruta Mane, hilarious) wants her to be a model, and a tantrum throwing boy, who flings himself on the ground and howls if he disagrees with something (Romi Jaspal, amusing), with whose help he builds a time machine out of a washing machine, so that he can travel to the future and see what he will grow up to be.
The time travel is not the point of the play, however, what comes across is the ease and warmth of the parent-child relationship and friends who support unconditionally. Like most kids, Murli changes his mind, one day he wants to be a politician(with his symbol being a blank piece of paper representing time), next day he wants to be an astronaut.
Without a clear plot, the play coasts along on the sweetness of the relationships and the mischief of the kids, and in the end, perhaps without meaning to, Time Boy says a lot about innocence and the motivating power of dreams.
