First Love

Thespian Alert

Like his selection of films, Naseeruddin Shah’s choice of plays that he does with his group Motley, is also unpredictable.  But audiences love to see him on stage, so every play he appears in gets ’em flocking to the theatre.

His last play,  A Walk In The Woods (with Rajit Kapoor, directed by Ratna Pathak Shah) is a sell out, but it does contain popular elements. His latest, Samuel Beckett’s First Love (a short story converted to a theatrical piece) is an unusual choice.  A dark piece about a misogynistic man, who lives on a park bench after being thrown out of the family home, is as funny as it is disturbing.  

The tramp-like man is given shelter by a hooker, and accepts her largesse as it were his due and letting her serve him as he lolls on a couch. That he might be in love with her is indicated in a comic and yucky scene in which he writes her name in cowpat and licks his finger.

Shah played the creepy guy with an irresistible charm,  that has audiences riveted for 90 minutes, studded with many laugh-out-loud moments.  So many of them had travelled long distances to NCPA’s Godrej Theatre to see him, and were rewarded with undiluted Beckett-- sardonic, witty, honest and nasty.  What they didn’t know was that Shah rehearsed meticulously and performed in spite of a painful back, because he had committed to the show for NCPA's Centrestage Festival.  That standing ovation was richly deserved.

Our Town

Classic Gold

Ask anyone who does theatre in Mumbai, how tough it is to get two actors together, leave aside 20!  Akvarious’s Our Town, a Pulitzer Prize-winning classic by Thornton Wilder, is a poignant, low-key yet dramatic portrayal of ordinary life in an American town in the early 20th century. Directed by Akash Khurana, who also plays Wilder’s narrator or Stage Manager, Our Town shows that there can be poetry in everyday life, and something as routine as the newspaper boy delivering the paper, the train passing in a distance,  the voices of the choir carrying into the quiet evening air can become punctuations in the days and nights that are lived with little variation, but lots of joys and sorrows.  Watching the play today brings about a harsh realisation of how much life has progressed, and also how little this the progress has added to the day-to-day living of ordinary people.

Khurana always manages to get the right actors for the main parts—even though the ones who play parents are much too young.  Still Faisal Rashid as the town doctor and father of the young romantic (Karan Pandit) who woos and weds the girl next door (Abir Abrar) has the kindliness and dignity of old-style patriarchs.  The mothers, Lucky Vakharia and Prerna Chawla are charming.

Young audiences might see a glimpse of the past in the play, while seniors are likely to be awash in nostalgia. Akash Khurana had adapted the play in an Indian setting, and lost it.  He is still searching for it.