REVIEW: Haath Ka Aaya... Shunya

HAPPINESS IS A PHONE-CALL AWAY

The first port of call in Manav Kaul’s new play, Haath Ka Aaya.. Shunya, is a tiny matchbox apartment, put together rather quaintly by a couple trying very hard, day in and day out, to keep up the appearances of well-ordered living.  They seem to exist in an awkward equilibrium of emotion. It is a polite household, where affection is merely a series of courtesies, and social interaction is rehearsed to the point of infuriating pretension; not unlike a chest stuffed with little vanities—gauze and lace and precious trimmings but nothing really substantial. Happiness is a function of short measures and the illusion is kept going by the trappings—the accumulated acquisitions that the couple hope will reflect some quality of themselves that would otherwise remain obscured. There is dysfunction not because there is strife but because everything is contrived, a part of an unending daily-soap continuum where there is always a façade of cheery faced exuberance. Indeed, each morning they are diligently visited by a clown (Trimala Adhikari), a self-professed peddler of joy, who reminds them to stay resolutely happy, quite selflessly it would seem, but there is some fine print involved.

This unwariness is delivered to stage by two astute performers (Geetanjali Kulkarni and Kumud Mishra), who bring to life the unassuming Himachali couple in winter woolens, who are slowly but surely being grafted as card-holding members of a freshly identified sales demographic, unwittingly playing a part in the silent and invisible conspiracy to subvert their own lives. They are now sitting ducks to cold calling scams and hard sells of any kind, poster children of latter day consumerism. In many ways, their carefully constructed situation isn’t real, it’s make-believe, almost theatre. This is a play within the play. The actors are stilted, like puppets, because they’ve internalized the stock tropes of their respective characters and the strings are pulled elsewhere as they go about their lives with clockwork-like precision in a social order where everything is for sale.

As we step out of the matchbox, the clown and others of her kind draw us into their hop-skip-and-jump world. The play references the classic by Badal Sarkar, Evom Inderjit, but these clowns are not a disaffected lot. This particular generation is ready to join the cult of the mainstream without too much of a struggle. The political bent of mind gives way to oneupmanship and a survivalistic zeal. Angst gives way to self-serving competitiveness. At the very top of the hierarchy is yet another clown (Umesh Jagtap) who pontificates from his high stool, and lays down the rules of engagement for new enterprise, while the denizens on the ground below give in to ritualistic jousting to get a prized job as the head honcho’s main man—this has been presented as a kind of breezy choreography. The clowns would think they’re in control of their destinies, but they’re merely cogs in the wheel, energizer bunnies who serve a bigger cause. They are persuasive salesmen who revel in doling out little delights and sweet nothings to an unsuspecting populace. Ad-libbing becomes second nature, but they are themselves under the influence of a larger propaganda. The head clown holds sway over this circus, raking in the moolah through eyeballs and footfalls, and little secret registers that are scarcely decipherable to the naked eye.

Then twice removed, amongst us (in the audience) are other members of the cast, watching on, too caught up in the vagaries of their own lives to make sense of the portents on stage. There’s a couple, played by Nimrat Kaur and Nagesh Bhonsle, who are natural in their deportment, clad in undersaturated colors, real in the way they approach their ‘it’s complicated’ relationship. They sit beside us, they walk up the aisle in the seating area; engaging in some generic horseplay, some abuse, some misshaped memories of a childhood that wasn’t really innocent. It’s funny how latecomers to the play (performed at the NCPA Experimental Theatre) seem to almost have walk-on parts, and cellphones that routinely go off (despite the usual directive to switch them off) almost have a prescient quality, not to mention seats that creak as members of the audience shuffle uncomfortably in them, not fully perceiving the mirror to their own lives that Mr Kaul has orchestrated carefully, but not superbly.

One of a series of ten plays specially commissioned for the NCPA Centrestage Festival, this play is possibly the only one that tries to push a few boundaries. It’s a set-up that has layers to its narrative, quite literally and otherwise. It is not designed to be a production that has its audience eating out of the palm of its hand as it were, nor does it try and cultivate ‘friends and family’ ever ready to spring up for the undeserved standing ovation. We don’t really care about those particular set of theatre-goers who are only eager for little observational nuggets that they can laugh at, or cuss-words that make them feel connected to a script. This script is written to challenge, and there’s much to enjoy in the way it sets upon the task at hand. However, its themes deserve a more groundbreaking treatment. It provokes somewhat but not quite in a seminal way.

Mr Kaul’s troupe are an enthusiastic bunch of actors in a play that seems prone to a ‘Look, ma! No hands!’ kind of cleverness at times. Persuasion works in little unknown ways, and this play needed to imprint its sensibility upon its audience. It doesn’t do that completely because a satire has been woven out of a premise that is rather simplistic in these times. Is the consumerist bubble really that all-pervasive? Have people really been reduced to mere automatons? Is the world around us really a mega consumption driven society? The play reduces the human condition to a few trite lines at a time when the social order seems to arguably encourage individual choice like never before. Thanks to technology, consumerism is about operating in an functional universe. More is actually more. Spending is a virtue. Haath Ka Aaya.. Shunya is an old-fashioned cautionary tale but dystopia is no longer of any interest (nor is utopia). Activism is a feel-good thing. Maybe a more interesting point of view would be that of the clown who thinks for herself (and with a budding actress like Ms Adhikari at hand, possibilities do exist).

Comments

[Deepa Gahlot]

Superb!

[Yogesh Yadav]

I want to contact Kumud Mishra. I like him a lot and want to meet him personally.

[Vikram Phukan]

Hi Yogesh - you can read his interview here...

http://www.filmimpressions.com/stage/2010/11/interview-kumud-mishra.html

Best of luck on your search.