A theatre experience can be magical but what happens when magic itself descends on the theatre? Well for starters, you get a title like GREY ELEPHANTS IN DENMARK! You might be tempted to google it and you might already know what it refers to. So you might be a little enlightened. But all the same you’re intrigued. You’re curious. You wonder. And you might just want to find out more. It’s a good thing because you must.
At 21 years of age, Chaitanya Tamhane has a keen mind. And while his first, professional play as a writer-director is indulgent in the sense of the young writer writing himself, it still promises to be intelligent entertainment. At the heart of the play is magic, but not the kind of popular variety tricks witnessed at ‘magic shows and children’s birthday parties’. Chaitanya, a chap of various talents and a magician himself creates protagonist Vinay Iyengar (Digvijay Savant), a man with an instinctual and an intellectual appetite for magic.
The play in effect traces the journey of this gifted magician- from his teens to his sixties. Vinay Iyengar is not only a genius of sorts but is also a rebel, an iconoclast and idealist for whom magic is just not a bagful of tricks to display or cheap thrills to be gained by seeing a woman cut in half but rather an elevated art form to aspire to. So as it happens with all people who incessantly question and think rather than just be ‘happy’ like Vinay’s own friend from school, Vinay too spends a lot of time in contemplation and interrogation. He is critical, demanding but nevertheless passionate about magic. Somewhere along the way he takes a break and returns as a practiced Mentalist.
He has a companion in his mentor (Romi Jaspal) and comes to hold in great esteem a lady magician (Ahlam Khan), whoms he thinks to be far superior to him. Vinay earns his plaudits but can’t seem to overcome a gnawing sense of disillusionment. So in his sixties he grows ‘quieter and quieter’ but is still alive enough to mentor and enjoy the small things in life such as salad talk and a dance with a pretty young woman. ‘Grey Elephants in Denmark’ might not be so cryptic after all but in performance, Chaitanya treats his audience, young and old alike to a spectacle that is part theatre, part magic.
By no means it is a grand spectacle. It’s very down-sized actually, played out in the pure spirit of minimalist theatre but it’s special enough to create the effect of a ‘show’ on offer; a show in which the audience interacts and participates with the actors on stage. The play is enacted as a series of short scenes and the narrative sequences in which Ahlam Khan plays the narrator are funny and whimsical. The dance sequence by Pooja Pant and Sarita Shirodkar is fantastically delightful. Chaitanya has succeeded in turning his actors into magicians and with magic or otherwise, all of them do well. Digvijay Savant and Romi Jaspal are very capable actors while Ahlam Khan gives a colorful touch to Anita- a pukka Gujarati lady magician from Ghatkopar. There is a nice, spoken quality about Chaitanya’s writing and for a first play as a writer, that’s very good.
An avid theatregoer and actor from a young age, Chaitanya has also been seeking to explore new ways of performance. He has been critical (and rightly so) of a lot of contemporary Indian Theatre, which is far too conventional and outdated. But whether it is in terms of breaking with the accepted styles of performance or in wanting to be more ambitious where magic itself is concerned, the play is still very much within the boundaries of what one is already familiar with. This could be because of limitations like what one can actually achieve on stage given the complexity of the subject, not to mention the usual constraints faced by many a theatre practitioner. So the play is refreshing but it isn’t exactly the kind of theatre that puts you at the edge of your seat.
It would actually be more interesting to see what Chaitanya might do in his next play. GREY ELEPHANTS IN DENMARK is a very likeable play but if one were to be as demanding as the young Mr. Tamhane himself or like the protagonist that he creates in his image, then this is just the beginning.
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