Citizen Reviews: Colour Blind

August 18, 2014 03:26 pm | Updated November 26, 2021 10:27 pm IST - Bangalore

CRASHING SPACE AND TIME BARRIERS Colour Blind. Photo: K. Murali Kumar

CRASHING SPACE AND TIME BARRIERS Colour Blind. Photo: K. Murali Kumar

All around awesomeness

An awesome script, a combination of English Hindi and Bengali with a hint of French mixed in perfection. Congratulations to Kalki for her awesome performance, Swanand Kirkire’s entry with a bell was amazing and Satyajit Sharma made one see Tagore in every line he spoke. The casual conversation and also the characters’ interactions kept the audience entertained.

KISHORE M. NARAYAN

Same tunes, new voices

Manav Kaul’s Colour Blind was a lot of things. Eccentric and clichéd all at once, it rang the same tunes through new voices. I don’t think playwrights honour that fourth wall – the audience-actor divide anymore, they break it down to such a great extent that you can’t be sure it was ever there in the first place. If a play should deface the sobriety of Tagore’s portraits and replace it all with boyish confusion, this one did it well.

The depth of the play is staggered, and teeters at the edge of eccentricity. A non-linear treatise that shows us that Tagore was just another man on some level – with a troubled childhood , complicated love interest in the form of Ocampo, and a problem with death. The actors were extraordinary, they donned multiple roles with great finesse and left the audience in wonder with their skilful singing.

You walk through the play hand in hand with Tagore, almost living the confusion of impossible love and repetitive loss through him.

SNEHA RAM

Hooked in minutes

As a Bengali, I can assure you that we feel only one of us can do justice while trying to explain Tagore, his work and his influence on our community, at large. So watching an essentially non Bengali cast and director trying to enunciate the depth of Tagore’s literary accomplishments was quite interesting. Yet, when Satyajit Sharma recited the first Bengali poem of the evening in heavily accented tones, I was quite sceptical about the rest of the evening.

On the surface, the play seemed to be about the relationship between Tagore and Victoria Ocampo. So a story about Tagore and his relationship with a handful of women was not really the main draw of this play. Within minutes, I was hooked on to the innovative direction unfolding on stage. The play was split and yet interwoven across four levels of stage production – Tagore’s lonely childhood, his later years and meeting with Ocampo, the women in his life and their presence in his literary works, death chasing his family over the years … and of course, the central characters who were writing a play.

I was pleasantly surprised that sufficient research that has gone into this play. The poems and songs matched the timeline in Tagore’s life. The overall theme and suggestion was that as a poet and writer, he essentially simulated parts of his own life on paper.

The songs were rendered beautifully and Tagore’s need to overcome the scars of his childhood, his conflict with self and family/ friends, his need for passion in any colour and form perfectly matched the choice of songs and poems recited within the play. The acting was natural by Kalki Koechlin and Satyajit Sharma. The day literally was won by the brilliant direction and researched interweaving of Tagore’s huge body of work. Though, a special mention is very much needed for the role essayed by Swanand Kirkire as Death.

URBI MUKHERJEE

Kalki rocks

No one could have resisted Colour Blind after reading about it in Metro Plus. Kalki Koechlin was simply at her best, portraying a myriad of emotions and expressions. Her opposite was a person who brought the best out of Kalki and churned out the essence of the play. Colour Blind is a love story bringing in the subtlety. In the end, Colour Blind was successful in striking a cord with the audience. It was a meticulously scripted play and blended in with the pleasant atmosphere of the evening. Manav Kaul’s effort was visible from the portrayal of the play and its smoothness will have to be credited to the tremendous amount of research that would have gone into it.

SUDHA M. POOVAIAH

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