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Writer : |
Eugene Ionesco |
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Director : |
Atul Kumar |
Cast : |
Ayesha Raza, Namit Das, Mukul Chadha & Suhas Ahuja |
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 Two people, isolated in a circular building surrounded by water, pass their empty days remembering a past populated by imaginary people.
The play fills the theatre with wall-to-wall laughter. It works because the two actors perform, backed by an invisible supporting cast whose presence they all-but make us see.
This production of The Company Theatre is turned into an uproarious vaudeville routine. At the end, a stab of poignancy pierces the fun, when the characters called the Old Man and Old Woman feel that their meaningless lives have been transformed at last.
A lot of the fun is the way the two people interact with all those guests whom only they can see. They are like a great vaudeville team as they give each new arrival an almost palpable presence. The man is courtly to an old flame who's lost her beauty ("your ears weren't always pointy"), bows and scrapes before a field marshal and grovels even more obsequiously with the arrival of the emperor -' represented by a blinding beam of light. She at one moment is shocked at the military man's lascivious romp with a female guest; at the next is grotesquely bumping and grinding in the arms of another invisible visitor.
 The play's hilarious centerpiece is an explosive scene that recalls the Marx Brothers and their increasingly crowded stateroom. Here, of course, the new arrivals are unseen, but that doesn't prevent the two harried hosts from bustling about in mounting frenzy. She (helped by a directorial device that's like pushing a fast-forward button) rushes out one door and back through another in the same instant, carrying on more and more chairs.
Ultimately, with the arrival of a puppet-like Orator), we see that the messenger is as incoherent as the message.
 
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