Finally, which rhymes with enough. Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough? Hiccough has the sound of cup. My advice is to give up.
With this note of despair, George Bernard Shaw ends his long poem called English Pronunciation. On Tuesday evening, Kenneth Desai of Motley took the audience at the Shilpa Kala Vedika for a ride with quick asides about the peculiarities of English pronunciation. As the actor pronounced the words ranging from ‘scholar, vicar, cigar, solar, mica, war, far; one, anemone,' the audience tittered with excitement as each word came up on a screen and they tried to match Kenneth's pronunciation.
This was followed by a much more zany play: ‘How he lied to her husband'. A youth in an evening dress and a smart cape talks to an equally fashionably dressed woman who is distraught that the love poems addressed to her have been lost.
A wink, a nudge and a knowing smile move the husband-wife-lover relationship to a different plane as the husband Teddy (Kenneth Desai), the lover Henry (Anand Tiwari) and the wife Aurora (Trishla Patel) spar with words and emotions. At certain points of time the verbosity became tedious but then Anand Tiwari with his livewire performance had Trishla Patel as the perfect counterfoil with her frivolous social observations and fake grace.
Anand danced around the stage like a ballerina and showed how he would take out Teddy with a few blows. The play turns social norms on its head when the cuckolded husband feels that the poems do justify the beauty of his wife. Then he hears Henry's noble intentions:
“Yes, I do mean it, and a lot more too. I asked Mrs Bompas to walk out of the house with me – to leave you – to get divorced from you and marry me. I begged and implored her to do it this very night. It was her refusal that ended everything between us. What she can see in you, goodness only knows!”
This changes the equation where the husband develops love, affection and sympathy for Henry. And the audience got its wicked kicks.
Last on the platter was ‘Village Wooing' that poked good-natured fun at marriage, wooing, class hierarchy and social climbing. The three-act play opens with a man on the deck of a cruise ship busily trying to write and a woman desperate to strike up a conversation. How the social equations change when the couple meet under different circumstances at a village shop formed the crux of the play. Shaw navigates the minutia of social equations and universalises his message with tongue in cheek humour. The three plays were set in England of a different era, but the language, the social graces, customs and beliefs transcended everything as the message resonated with the audience in Hyderabad.
The plays directed by Naseeruddin Shah were presented by Qadir Ali Baig Foundation.
