This play by the Chandigarh-based company - The Company was what saved the Hyderabad Hindu Metroplus theatre festival 2008 from being a complete dud.
The play dramatised by Surjit Patar and directed by Neelam Mansingh Chowdhary is based on a short story by the South African Can Themba. It is easy to see what attracted Neelam Mansingh Chowdhary to it; it is a powerful story. A young couple’s extremely loving marriage begins to disintegrate into a sadomasochistic struggle of guilt and blame. The husband (Bunty) comes home one day to find his wife (Minna) in bed with her lover. Even as he struggles to deal with the shock he sees the lover’s discarded suit. He decides to use the suit as a weapon of revenge. He compels his contrite guilt-ridden wife to treat the suit as an honoured guest. No explanation is sought or given by either of them. From then begins a stressful grappling at normalcy underlined by the ever-present fear of blame and punishment for the wife and memory of betrayal for the husband.
The suit, in Bunty’s words, becomes the third presence; ubiquitously rearing its head in the most intimate of moments. Minna begins to crumble under the stress of not knowing when next it may destroy her peace.
Mansingh’s treatment of the material is imaginative as it is raw in a way that is pure Punjab. The play itself is in both Punjabi and English. Poetic Punjabi is always a strongly sensuous experience; it was particularly so in this play. There is a scene (highly stylised) played out in verse, in which Minna is applying for membership at the local social club. She has just sought Bunty’s blessing and now wants his help to fill the form. Minna begins to read out the usual biographical queries of the form which Bunty turns on their head to general and specific accusations and philosophic questions. It was of the stuff Punjabi was designed to do. Exquisite.
This production’s finest accomplishment is perhaps the bubble of intimacy it manages to create around the protagonists. It is a bubble that excludes all other- the extended world, society, the erstwhile lover, the audience. This bubble breaks and reforms in an increasing taut tempo leading up to a meltdown where Minna adopts her guilt by donning the suit herself and calling it her skin. Whether it is an act of defiance or surrender, it empowers her and wrests the initiative from the oppressor.
Vajendar Bharadwaj who plays Bunty is a wonderfully supple actor. He moves from joyously happy to wretched to ominous seamlessly. Mansingh has chosen to use elaborately stylised movement and choreographed elements in her rendering of Bunty. It helped enormously perhaps that Bharadwaj is such a beautiful man with extraordinary grace and a remarkable lack of stage-gaucheness.
Ramanjit Kaur as Minna was competent and seasoned but far more effective in her Punjabi lines that the English ones. It is perhaps difficult for female actors not to tug at their clothing if constantly required to dress and undress onstage, but one wishes she had desisted.
It is galling to nitpick at things that give you pleasure but unfortunately it is annoyingly easy.
It is a common ploy with long-running plays to try to create a certain immediacy and locality by using contextual elements of time and place. These methods are usually adopted to build a connection with the audience and set the play as close to them as possible. With this play such devices were not only unnecessary but highly unsuited. This play was about two people caught in their own very intimate, bizarre tradedy. It is not made more intense by bringing it closer to the audience, only less so. So then, when Bunty reads out from that morning’s Deccan Chronicle or talks of walking along Banjara Hills it may induce a few local smiles but at the cost of breaking a spell. In the penultimate scene where the couple are throwing a party and the two protagonists had managed to construct a superb atmosphere of brittle bonhomie with their beautifully - orchestrated air-talking, Bunty’s walking down the stage to the press section and offering an apple to a journalist in the audience came in the manner of swatting the fly on the wall.
Also, in a play which is powerful because so little is explained (Minna’s taking a lover, Bunty’s whimsical character) it seemed like a lukewarm cop-out to try and explain Minna’s submission in terms of a social dilemma instead of an emotional compulsion. She talks of not being able to leave and return to her parents which only worked to dilute the tension that had been so lovingly built up. It softened the texture of attrition which emerges during negotiations of power within physical and emotional spaces.
However, like Neelam Mansingh Chowdhary indicated during the post-play discussions, such plays are works in progress. The very fact that so much is unstated leaves you with fascinating possibilities. It is the kind of play I would want to see again after its hundredth show. It is bound to have evolved and it would be exciting to chart its growth.
