After executing a fourth edition of Writers’ Bloc in Mumbai last month, in which they opened a new play, Rage Theatre have staged The Siddhus of Upper Juhu , at Singapore’s Victoria Theatre on Sunday. This is bang in the middle of Singapore’s ethnically-diverse civic district, an area perhaps not too alien to the ethos of the play, in which a Sikh man (Rajit Kapur) married to a Parsi woman has a meltdown as the reaction to the city’s growing problems. This Rahul da Cunha-helmed production includes the regime change.
Shernaz Patel plays Behroze, the homemaker who is forced to take up a job in the play’s second half. Her anglicised self holds no currency in a world (the imagined ‘Upper Juhu’) in which old social orders are crumbling, and her broken Hindi does her any favours. Yet, she holds forth with a quiet dignity while managing both home and work with a feistiness that isn’t ostentatious. She does resolutely try to hold on to her decorous self, always immaculately turned out in a fetching aquamarine dress. Taking this literally is much more interesting than catering to the idea that Patel’s costume changes have to attain the standard of sartorial elegance that the Ikea decor of the lounge, in which the play takes place, mandates.
In one scene, Kapur riles up a neighbour with his remonstrations and a pail of water is thrown at him for his efforts. In the original black comedy, The Prisoner of Second Avenue by Neil Simon, the wife then provokes the same neighbour, and then when the husband goes out to the balcony, he gets drenched in another pail of water. It is one of those moments of comedic gold that are invariably mined for the comic mainstay of any play, which is almost always the man. Da Cunha’s version, with its light feminist touches, subverts this universal rule. When Patel has her outburst, she is quite spectacularly rewarded with a pail of water herself. This takes place backstage, and when she returns on stage drenched to the skin, it is a wonderful moment that is certainly hilarious, but adds this very elusive quality of vulnerability to her performance. We don’t see that too often in her turns, which are routinely masterful, controlled affairs. Here, she relinquishes that hold for a few seconds perhaps, and creates a beautiful stage moment.
In another scene, a silken stole thrown to the ground in a fit of pique, is retrieved by Patel and set down on the sofa in exactly the same askew manner as it had been placed earlier. It speaks of an obsessive-compulsiveness that hadn’t betrayed by Behroze’s genially obliging self earlier. But for those who tend to believe that some performers exist in a cosmic continuum of all the characters they inhabit, it offers an interesting segue into a part that Patel returns to play on the same stage weeks later, as part of an irascible quartet in Q Theatre Productions’ staging of Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage . In a similarly accoutred living room, as a stuffy upper-class woman, Patel wraps herself in facile privilege and passive-aggressive hi-jinks, to take scenery-chewing to another level, in the better sense of the phrase. Behroze wouldn’t have lasted one minute in this mayhem.
More evidence of Patel’s range, so seldom demanded of her in her work for film, can be found in her turn as the protagonist, Dina Dalal, in a dramatisation of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance , which was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 last year. This is a vocal performance in a radio play, but there is remarkable texture in her portrayal, as she negotiates a veritable lifetime that takes her from the earnestness of youth to the jaded, yet spirited, impassiveness of one’s advancing years, no doubt aided by Mistry’s expansive themes that bring such edge to the characterisation. Patel’s own journey in theatre flashes before our eyes, particularly her beginnings — the prized role of the young Indira Gandhi in Lavonne Mueller's Letters to a Daughter from Prison at 25 , which was also broadcast on Doordarshan. That spark is still there. A refreshing feature of A Fine Balance is that it is, by and large, populated with Indian theatre actors enunciating with natural tongues, making it a far cry from earlier BBC radio plays set in India, that were voiced with those infuriatingly stereotypical Indian accents that Hollywood invented in the 1930s.
With such a powerhouse performer at their disposal, here’s hoping Rage Theatre gives Patel her rightful place in the jury in their upcoming staging of Reginald Rose’s riveting courtroom drama for Aadyam. The play, commonly titled Twelve Angry Men , frequently features all-male troupes. Indeed, it is populated with male archetypes who must live up to these unreal expectations of masculinity — in this case, the need to be so emphatically decisive in deliberations within a protracted murder trial. In this iteration, it is called Twelve Angry Jurors , which usually implies a mixed-gender ensemble that could be spearheaded by Kapur and Patel, perhaps. They are still our best bets when it comes to delivering pièce de résistance turns on Mumbai’s perennially nascent English theatre stage.
The writer is a playwright and stage critic
Shernaz Patel holds forth with a quiet dignity while managing both home and work with a feistiness that isn’t ostentatious
