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Entertainment
Trapped in perceptions
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The Chennai audience was quick to respond to the humour in Mahesh Dattani's play, ``Where There Is A Will," writes ELIZABETH ROY.
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Mirroring Dattani's sentiments... ``Where There Is A Will''. — Pic. by S. R. Raghunathan.
HASMUKH MEHTA, the vengeful and self-centred garment tycoon, wants to leave his wife Sonal, son Ajit, daughter-in-law Preeti and even mistress Kiran (who was also his chief marketing executive) in a hopeless bind through a will that locks up all his wealth for 21 years in a charitable trust. The will appoints Kiran as the trustee and in effect the head of the Mehta family. Instead of riding a buffalo to the legions of the dead, Hasmukh, the ghost, opts to stay back for a last laugh.
Kiran uses her position of power to nurture her new family. Wife and mistress bond. Sonal finds her space in her husband's death. Ajit finds the confidence his father denied him. Kiran laughs that Hasmukh only looked for in her the woman who would father him. Sonal smiles, ``I am glad you (Kiran) are living with us. I hope you'll stay with us for ever." Hasmukh, defeated, runs out in search of his buffalo.
The bare plot around which Mahesh Dattani has written his first play offers one much laughter and a lot of humour. It also holds a mirror up to us, by showing a group of people trapped in their own perceptions. Dattani himself describes the play as ``the exorcism of the oppressive patriarchal code." He wanted to show, he says, what happens when women, who depend on their men, are pushed to the edge.
The play, ``Where There's A Will," which the Rotary Club of Meenambakkam presented last weekend, opened to an audience who were quick to respond to the humour in Dattani's lines. Sudhir Ahuja as Hasmukh carefully studied everything and everyone he interacted with and reflected on them and their actions. He used his money as the only tool to control his family and his mistress — a most convincing Dattani character who went down very well with the audience. Karthik Srinivasan played a good Ajit, hungry for space to grow and hungrier for his father's money. Set against each other, father and son established the point that Dattani was trying to make. The small role, however, did not give Karthik too much of an opportunity to prove his potential.
In the second act, director Mithran Devanesan went against the playwright's stipulation that ``Where There's A Will" should not be played farcical. This unexpected twist caused the play to lose its grip over the audience. The latter half of the script shows Hasmukh as the man who had `goofed his plans' and is confronted by a need to have changed. He lost out because it dawned on him too late, after he had run out of options. Instead, we were given a comic variation, which caused a break from the first act and left little room for the heavy humour, which should have bailed the play out. One also felt that all of Ahuja's potential was being choked.
The other quarrel one has with Devanesan is his portrayal of Kiran. Mistresses are not uncommon in our society and they are almost never hookers in black and red and loud makeup. The character of Kiran complements Sonal. She is a highly competent professional who finally did in Hasmukh Mehta. Sheethal Govindan did not give Kiran the personality and strength of character she deserved. Swetha Ravishankar's Preeti was another part that was not fully explored, particularly because it plays a pivotal part in the plot. A jumble of accents meant to be Indian coming from Indians portraying a Mehta family in Gujarat left one wondering as also the gaps that dotted the performance. The silences were long enough to distract and did not quite help the already slow pace at which the play moved.
Unfazed by any of this was Kavery Lalchand's Sonal, which quite escaped any of the perils of the second act. The evening was clearly hers and she carried the play single-handedly. It was a pleasure to watch her Sonal break free of male (and female) domination and evolve into the delightful creature that waits in every woman. Her carefully chosen, very natural Indian accent lent much dignity to the archetypal woman.
In close competition with Lalchand's performance were Devanesan's sets, which were most striking. After a very long gap a box set from the master designer shows how the concept can evolve. In three levels he filled the Music Academy stage with two bedrooms, a living and a dining room that lead off into the kitchen. Flats downstage, sloping into the wings, tickled the imagination into encountering both the inside and the outside of the house simultaneously. A brilliant use of colours demarcated the areas clearly. Few people could have better answered Dattani's requirement of split sets, interior and exterior alongside a time-scale that is never static within its time frame.
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