Words, and the sheer joy of contemplating them...expressing them, and finally being able to communicate them in the dim lights of the theatre is a hallowed experience for both the actors and their audience. Few people know how to do this better than Naseeruddin Shah. It is indeed likely that the actor in him precedes the director and informs the latter role more strongly than one would perhaps think. Also, it reinforces the prominence of the script and the writer in the theatre that the formidable actor-director does with his theatre company Motley. Naseer's theatre is a theatre of words, or more pertinently of speech and of language. Even the most stripped down theatre of words as enigmatically captured by Beckett was turned into an absorbing expression of speech in one of Motley's oldest and best known productions- WAITING FOR GODOT. Even as we miss the 'fundamental sounds' that Beckett spoke of while describing his plays, the words (and there are presumably more in WAITING FOR GODOT as compared to Beckett's later work) are on mark in the much talked about Motley production that featured the company's founders- Benjamin Gilani- the production's director and a very fine actor, Tom Alter, and Naseer himself.
After a long tryst with Urdu writers- Sadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chugtai, Motley is back with George Bernard Shaw, another of Naseer's favourite writers who have long fascinated him. Needless to say, the words conjure up their magic again, and Naseer who has directed the play ascertains so. The production- a medley of two short plays and the longish poem ENGLISH PRONOUNCIATION bring alive the three most important features of Shaw's work- his wit, his ability to go beyond the obvious to delve into a variety of issues with humour, including relationships (or as Kenny Desai, one of the actors at the beginning says- 'the man-woman equation'), and his masterful use of language. VILLAGE WOOING, a simple enough piece, and even prosaic as the title might suggest, conveys all of these wonderful qualities and more.
Played superbly by Faisal Rashid and Aahana Kumra on the opening day of the production, the piece, 'a comedietta for two voices' while playing on the surface with the seemingly ordinary theme of an unlikely and a mismatched couple reveals or rather reads/speaks between the lines of how relationships and marriage have deeper truths. There is also a larger philosophical thrust about the institution of marriage itself, but Shaw never lets us become too serious even as his prose gets increasingly more wordy.
By contrast, HOW HE LIED TO HER HUSBAND although having the man-woman relationship as its subject once more, takes on a far lighter and funnier tone. Shaw visualized the one-act comedy as a departure from a 'stale situation of husband, wife and lover.' Kenny Desai, Trishla Patel and Anand Tiwari play the three characters and take on their parts quite well. The nasty surprise that a cuckolded husband is likely to get becomes an event of clever comedy as the tables are turned on the wife's beau. The piece also playfully reveals the reality of things as against the idealized and romantic aspect given to them.
Kenny Desai, who opens the production in a much casual drawing-room manner with sips of whiskey in-between, underlines the idiosyncrasies, and perhaps even the ludicrousness of the English language in the poem ENGLISH PRONOUNCIATION. The poem is quite without its dramatic appeal but the performance of it manages to sustain interest by the combined use of a screen on which words from the poem pop up, and from audience participation. It's more of a curiosity though, not to mention a shining example of Shaw's profound interest in words.
The costumes have been given a good thought to and the set design is simple as it is appropriate. So it is with the lights and the music. The production's focus is its actors and the words that they deliver. The production has a double cast, and it may happen that you could catch a show in which Aseem Hattangady and Imaad Shah are there. Should you watch this play at the NCPA Experimental Theatre, it may be a tad cumbersome to get a glimpse of the actors' expressions in the first act of VILLAGE WOOING. The choice of exploiting the Experimental Theatre's upper level as the setting for the lounge deck of a ship is not very viewer friendly. That apart, if good writing interests you, this is a production that you must certainly not miss. That it comes from a time honoured thespian; a man who has the wonderful and the discerning ability to know words and their context, is an absolute bonus.
