Sunday, November 12, 2023
Watched a play after ages- Relatively Speaking at BIC
Watched the hilarious play 'Relatively Speaking' at BIC, on Thursday evening. It was a play that only aimed to be funny, and did not mean to convey any 'deeper' message. The past 2- 3 plays which I watched have been embedded with deep message and meaning. The last I watched, 'Walk in the woods' starring Nasseruddin Shah, a deep conversation between an India and a Pakistani spy, was at NCPA in Mumbai in 2017, a good 6 years ago.
Relatively Speaking had funny dialogues and deliveries. It was also remarkable how the plot is allowed to build by taking some obvious dramatic liberties. There are 4 characters in the play, and 2 conveniently keep disappearing for some odd job or the other (cooking, gardening, etc), so that a solid head of confusion can be built up on miscommunication and misinterpretation . If the missing characters were present on stage, they would have clarified the confusing situation immediately. The humor is based on this built-up confusion. This dramatic element is a trope, though, but it (mostly) did not get grating. Due to its repetition it made itself obvious and therefore demanded the audience for its 'willing suspension of disbelief'. My favorite comic moment is when one of the bemused characters, just back from the garden and therefore not being onto the latest on-stage developments, is admonished thus: 'Do wear a hat when you go out in the sun '.
That's what's humor (building on what I had read somewhere)- you suspend your disbelief and allow an alternate reality to get created, and then a set of improbable or outlandish circumstances get built on top of that alternate reality, such that the entire reality is fragile, and then some last straw is kept on top of this fragile structure. This last straw your mind can't handle, and it bursts into laughter, as a 'system breakdown'.
Relatively Speaking is an old British play, written in 1965, so it has some elements of that time and place such as land line phones and travel from London to Kent. Those got a wee bit jarring. It was performed at BIC by Madras Players, which I read is India's oldest English theater group. Girish Karnad is its most famous alumnus. The acting was excellent, albeit somewhat exaggerated as the genre and the plot demands.
Two sidenotes: I finally got to watch a good play at BIC, one of the best (if not the best) venues for performance art in Bangalore. I have been eyeing it for long. We reached the venue 2 minutes late and all seats were taken, so had to do some calisthenics to squeeze into one of the aisles. Secondly, it was a day dedicated to 'play' - I played cricket in the morning after a gap of 6 months from rotator cuff muscle, waited 1 hour to get to see Mohammed Shami at the PUMA office, and lastly went and watched the play.
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