Coffee In The Canteen

All About Growing Up

Written by Shiv Subrahmanyam and directed by Coffee In The Canteen works well in the many alternative theatre spaces opening up in the city. The four-actor play can be done on a bare set with basic props, and few costume changes, but also be scaled up for an auditorium. It’s the simple and pleasant plot that makes it worth watching, not the external embellishment.

The four characters study in college and often hang out in the canteen—that has just four stools as props, and some crockery arranged on the wall. Rishi (Kavin Dave), a the science nerd takes a shine to baseball fanatic Rita (Amruta Sant), who hangs out with her Porsche-driving childhood buddy Sameer (Anant Joshi), but not quite sure if they are seeing each other. Rita’s best friend and confidante is Nusrat (Sarika Singh). Rita laughingly bats away Rishi’s eager attempts to befriend her, but in the end his persistence pays off. He is allowed to tag along with the other three when the go to see a movie or to a pub afterwards.

It is established that rich kid Sameer is passionate about dance (Joshi does a fine tap dance sequence) not really interested in his father’s business; also their parents in the same social circle expect that Sameer and Rita will marry some day. Rita is drawn to Rishi’s sense of humour, his encouragement of her dream to be a basketball player, and his dogged devotion to her, which leads him to be her coach and one-man cheer leader. Rishi took up science because it was expected of him, but he’d rather be a stand-up comic. The studious-looking Nusrat dreams of establishing her own business.

The play just follows them as they negotiate each day towards the time when their carefree student days will end and they will be forced to make decisions about their life. When Rishi asks they are able to say what their dreams are, but the story does not move towards a film-like happy ending where everybody gets what they want, in the way they imagined. The four actors do their parts competently, and manage to portray the energy and optimism of youth. With lights, sound and music used efficiently to enhance the upbeat mood of the play, Coffee In The Canteen turns out to be enjoyable, even with its minimalistic style of staging.

Baby’s Blues

A Bundle Of Misery

Ila Arun and KK Raina have directed Tammy Ryan’s Baby’s Blues, which picks up a subject not usually talked about—post partum depression.

Childbirth is perceived to be a happy occasion, the infant always referred to as “bundle of joy”, but many women in nuclear families have no clue about how to cope with the demands of motherhood. There may be magazine articles about the New Man, and enlightened organizations offer men paternity leave, but once a child has been brought into the world, it becomes the mother’s duty to care for it. Many women suffer severe anxiety, even suicidal or murderous thoughts, and the alarming feeling that they can’t really bring themselves to love a mewling, pooping, puking creature that has attached itself to them. People expect a new mother to be ecstatic, and all she feel is a sense of terror at the responsibility thrust upon her.

In Ryan’s play, Susan (Dilnaz Irani) gives birth to a daughter, and her problems start when she get home. Her husband David (Ankur Rathee) is supportive, but even he cannot understand his wife’s crankiness; nothing he does to make life easier for her, seems to please her. Susan gets hallucinations about a girl (Mia Maelzer), her absent mother (Shilpa Mehta) and “Frenchman” (Joy Sengupta),a 19^th century doctor, Louis-Victor Marce who studied and wrote about pre and post-partum psychiatric disorders.

“Where are all the women in my life when I need them?” Susan cries; her mother refuses to come and help, her best friend Terri (Sheena Chohan) is too busy and her doctor (Meher Acharia-Dar) keeps assuring her, with a chuckle, that whatever she is going through “is normal.”

Susan used to be a successful career woman, so her loss of control and loneliness result in a helpless rage that she unloads on to her husband.

However, the play does not quite work in the Indian context, when a woman might actually be overwhelmed with assistance—two sets of grandparents, neighbours, relatives and hired help.

Susan’s problems may be real but her irrational behavior somehow reduces the sympathy the viewer might have for her. She is an educated woman and should have been better prepared for pregnancy; her absolute refusal to seek help seems strange. The play was originally published in 2006, since then there is not just more awareness of women’s issues, but also on and offline support groups. There are cell phones used in the play, but no computer in sight.

It is a handsomely mounted production (set and light design by Salim Akhtar) and the performances by Irani and Rathee are outstanding. The running time is a problem though, particularly when, through most of it, the woman is whining about how motherhood wrecked her life. She quite rightly wonders, at one point, if this is what it’s like to have a child, how has the human race survived? How indeed!

Mirror Mirror

Twin Trouble

Even seasoned actors get a little nervous performing alone on stage, and Minissha Lamba has no theatre experience. Still, she manages to hold attention for the nearly 75-minute running time of Saif Hyder Hasan’s Mirror Mirror. 

The play, produced by Ashvin Gidwani is the English version of Aaine Ke Sau Tukde, which Hasan had staged around 2011, with TV star Shweta Tiwari.  The story is narrated by Meenal, who is one half of a set of twins. To begin with, she resents Manya, and throws tantrums if her parents appear to pay more attention to her sister. Manya is adopted by childless relatives living in New York and Meenal becomes the centre of attention. Then Manya’s adoptive parents are killed in a car crash and she returns to her old home.

Meenal is a spoilt brat and hates Manya even more, since she is the well-behaved pet daughter of her parents. Without meaning to, Manya destroys the happiness of her twin, Meenal just gets increasingly angry, and in trying to hurt Manya, ends up harming herself.

There are no more shades to the plot, but one long whine by Meenal. And the ending is abrupt, without a satisfying resolution. Meenal who is painted as a rebel and femme fatale, is actually quite ineffectual. Perhaps she needed a touch of real evil.

Some characters’ voices are recorded, but Lamba voices the others, which means she has to use and extend her vocal range to differentiate between the various people, even if it means, oddly enough, that the important character of Meenal’s husband, sings the lines, and it is very irritating.

The costume given to Lamba is dull and unattractive—even though there are blackouts and points when she leaves the stage, there are no costume changes. The set is a strange mix of realistic and fanciful. The idea of projecting visuals on the floor is clever, but marred by random graphics, signifying nothing.

Performed on a large stage, the actor’s movements are worked out carefully, so that the entire space is used well. The play does have potential to grow into a watchable piece of theatre, if only the director can decide if he wants it to be a thriller, family drama or a psychological study of neurosis.  If it is to be all three, then the ingredients have to be remixed.