The Open Couple - english drama review : www.MumbaiTheatreGuide.com

Direction :
Starring :

Dinesh Singh
Nazneen Madan, Jagdish Rajpurohit

Deepa Punjani

Intelligent comedies about man-woman relationships are usually hard to come by. Either they fall prey to a chauvinistic convenience or they end up as sentimental hokum. The former has typically been the case with several Gujarati and Marathi commercial entertainers. There are also instances of English comedies on the Mumbai stage that have been reduced to innocuous bedroom dramas. Contemporary Parsi theatre uses conventional plots, tried and tested humour and yes, even popular Hindi film songs (which other commercial language theatres continue to do too) to support the banal intrigues of its scheming husbands and suspicious wives.

In the absence of worthwhile predecessors in this genre (QTP�s production of BEYOND THERAPY is a recent exception), The Bombay Theatre Company�s adaptation of THE OPEN COUPLE stands out. The play written by the Nobel Prize winning Italian playwright Dario Fo and his actress-wife Franca Rame, is a witty and a farcical comedy about a husband and a wife who experiment with an �open relationship.� The adaptation largely follows the original but makes use of local cultural and political references in an attempt to contextualize the play for Indian audiences.

Enacted by Jagdish Rajpurohit and Nazneen Madan who play the husband and the wife respectively, the production however falls short of doing complete justice to the farcical nature of the play. So even while Nazneen Madan�s act as the hysteria prone, suicide-attempting wife who eventually turns the tables on her husband has more horsepower when compared to Rajpurohit�s funny but tepid performance, it is the sheer humour of the script that keeps you entertained. Dario Fo and Franca Rame also bring to the script the quality of �a play within a play.� We are intermittently reminded of how the two characters are merely actors who better remember their cues and stage directions!

The two actors nevertheless manage to keep pace with the tempo of the play, as a result of which hilarious moments such as the shooting sequence between the husband and the wife and the final scene in which the husband contemplates to kill himself with a hair-dryer come alive. The set too has been designed keeping in mind a clear, functional purpose that is essential to the action in the play.

But there is no doubt that while sections of Indian audiences have matured in their acceptance of subjects that were once completely taboo, drollery of this nature is still at cultural odds. And this perhaps explains why not only Indian actors find it difficult to manage the thin line between slapstick and farce but also why such adaptations are not entirely convincing. Despite its frailties, the young Bombay Theatre Company�s production will not disappoint you and its well-meaning attempt is bound to keep you suitably engaged.

*The writer is Editor of this site, a theatre critic and an academic keenly interested in Theatre and Performance Studies.

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