Direction : Danish Husain Writer : Ira Lewis Cast : Vrajesh Hirjee, Aamir Bashir, Danish Husain
CHINESE COFFEE Review
A new staging of Ira Lewis' play CHINESE COFFEE, although embellished with some perfunctory local touches, is more a 'straight up' production than a fully-fledged adaptation. The actors, Danish Hussain and Aamir Bashir, quickly mark their ground and bring out, almost instantaneously, the universality of the material. Their alter-egos, Yakub and Harvinder respectively, could very well just have been the original's Jake and Harry. This raises the question of whether it is really, such a stretch of imagination (as some would deem it) to picture Indian actors in undiluted parts drawn from the pantheon of world (read western) theatre. In the manner of their import and inflection, the two actors make a compelling argument for doing away altogether with this practice of recasting plays into a local mould, when it is clear that the Hoshruba Repertory, in only its second play, is attempting to solely 'represent' a script, than tame it to the needs of an innovative interpretation, local or otherwise.
Brijesh Hirjee (standing) and Danish Hussain in CHINESE COFFEE. Amir Bashir replaced Brijesh Hirjee in the 7 pm show at the NCPA-AGP Centrestage Festival.
Hussain has the width and breadth of fine delivery down to an art, although the bombast on display sometimes suggests he is channelizing an archetypal type of thespian, than just a despondent character at his disposal. In his fecklessness, Bashir is shriller by comparison, but dutifully stays with the material to make some gainful strides by the end. Both actors, playing failed writers, are given to fits of apoplectic rage that underscore moments of high drama, and mark them out as men of no uncertain integrity rather than just empty vessels at the end of their tether. They are placed in a set comprised entirely of wooden crates, diced and quartered and arranged to give off the vibe of a once well-appointed living room, allowing us a beautiful sense of the wear-and-tear that afflicts the creative soul who may be down on his luck, the onset of middle age without perks or money, and the squalor that depression invites onto itself (which Hussain doesn't quite evoke as much as spells it out).
Sometimes stray glimpses of a very delectable parallel narrative, rich in subtext, reveals itself. Hussain stoutly announces himself as Yakub Ansari, a self-avowed liberal who summarily dismisses some of the regressive Muslim attitudes. Bashir's Harvinder, entranced by the kinship, bewitched by the culinary, yearns to be culturally assimilated with the hoi polloi at Old Delhi's Jama Masjid, if only to be accorded the funeral procession of a king. The humble nihari becomes a metaphor for the texture of a close-knit community. They are men of letters, falling to bits about themselves, forsaken by their women, but only encumbered by the kind of conditioning that men of a certain vintage continue to cling on to. However, the adaptation remains woefully inadequate. Random lines in Urdu, or even protestations attesting to the therapeutic powers of paya soup don't quite even the scales. You would expect it to come with the territory, since Hussain is one half of the famous Dastangoi duo and has become a national treasure of sorts, and Bashir recently gave us the emphatically beautiful film 'Harud'.
We are left with the tired premise of an out-of-work writer, scavenging from his own life to produce the kind of salacious fare that may well earn him some serious money (a reference to Chetan Bhagat in the play is left wryly truncated). The questions it raises on friendship, on creative skullduggery, on scraping the bottom of the barrel, have since passed into the realm of tropes that may have enthralled a generation or two but offer no new currency to these times. The play succeeds in getting the text across to its audience, and its moments of somnolence are offset by those instances of rare candour that may signal a real breakthrough in a friendship, especially one that goes back several decades. We are all set to fail spectacularly in the end, and it's an emotional pay-off that the play delivers with gusto.
