Laughs all the way

LAST WEEKEND, it was a treat for theatre lovers who turned up at the Alliance Francaise for Four Comedies by David Ives, directed by Amarendran.

The surreal plays threw up some noteworthy performances, especially by the young debutants. The endless practice sessions of the past few weeks had finally paid off.

By the time three caged chimps, named Milton, Swift and Kafka (Vinita Bharadwaj, Pushkar and Suseel Gandhi) tried their fingers at `Words, Words, Words', the crowd got a hang of what was in store for the rest of the evening - pure offbeat intellectual humour.

`Philadelphia' did have the audience in splits, with Al (Pushkar AKS) and Mike (Karthik Srinivasan) doing the chunk of the emoting, handling it quite comfortably, though at times a tad loud. The girls Aditi and Niveditha chipped in with their bit as waitresses.

Next, it was Karthik who played Bill in the Bill-meets-Betty dialogue `Sure Thing', and Vinita playing Betty, both of them having their share of punchlines, Karthik evoking a slightly better response from the audience, thanks to his comical body language.

The finale, `Universal Language' was clearly among the best received parts of the evening, with Aditi as the naive stutterer Dawn who wants to learn Una Munda from Don played by Chandermouli, quite subtly.

It was quite strange to watch girls laughing to the translation of `Man' into Una Munda being `aspirin'. So is Man the headache or the cure for headache? David Ives knew the answer, probably a section of the audience didn't get it.

The show ran packed on both days, with the air- conditioning failing on Day Two. So what, the audience seemed to be in splits most of the time inside the hall.

At the end of it all, Amar seemed to be a satisfied man. He thought that the quality of response was better on Saturday than Sunday.

Reason: An educated audience walks in late for the performance and some of them don't even switch off their mobile phones despite the requests.

By Sudhish Kamath

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