Playing with history

Y ou want to stage a play with three female characters delving into Bangalore's history. You cast two actors but cannot find a suitable third for love or money. What do you do? If you're Ram Ganesh Kamatham you replace her with an old raincoat.

The magic raincoat turned out to be an inspired choice because it aptly matched the tone of “Bust”, Kamatham's latest play (made possible by a Robert Bosch Art Grant), which warped time and space and blended myth and fantasy with a fair sprinkling of history. The moment either of the two women, Kavya (Deepika Arwind) or Sandhya (Mallika Prasad), put on the raincoat, they were possessed by the spirit of the third woman. Problem is, one wasn't sure whom the woman, whose name is mentioned only once in passing, is supposed to represent. Kavya and Sandhya, childhood friends and sparring partners, appeared to symbolise the head and the heart respectively — the intellectual as opposed to the emotional approach to grasping the essence of Bangalore.

How does one paint a faithful portrait of a city? Through theory and analysis? Through nostalgia and memory? Kamatham poses these questions but doesn't answer them. Conclusions evade him. Sandhya's determined search in the depths of a 1000-year-old cave temple for an ancient stone bust (an obvious metaphor for the recovery of the city's rich past and their own buried memories) reflects the playwright's attempt to re-discover his city. The treasure is elusive, and so is the fruit of his search. It is as if the historical research he ploughed through and the diverse experiences he gathered to write the play have left him bewildered, and he transferred this confusion onto his characters. The loop that plays in his head plays itself out through them. If they are going around in circles, it is because he himself is.

It is of course next to impossible for a play to offer a definitive and all-encompassing view of a city. The most that a playwright can do is shine his trusty flashlight of truth on at least some of its multi-hued facets. Sharp vignettes work better than dull inventory.

The play suffers from a slight overdose of historical and geographical fact, but it contains enough local references, urban legends and telling slices of life to keep the audience entertained. (The ladies hostel, the lungi-clad ghost of Ulsoor Lake — we could do with more of those, but should be spared that old chestnut about boiled beans.) As always, Kamatham proves that he has a good ear for the witty and the absurd. But the interlude in the airport is baffling. There is an encounter between two strangers, the new airport (the site of Tipu's birthplace) morphs into the old HAL airport, and the past returns in the form of sparrows, which then turn to rats… Is this a hint of the Bangalore plague of 1898? A random time-warp that presages the many that will follow?

The actors were a treat to watch from start to finish, never once skipping a beat or tripping over a line. There has clearly been a lot of improvisation in rehearsal, most notably the delightful playroom scene. While the use of mountaineering equipment is dramatic — the play opens with Sandhya rappelling slowly from the roof and the scene continues with her suspended midway — there is a danger of it impeding the pace.

It is a truism that there are many Bangalores. Trying to encompass them all in one play is, to quote Kamatham, perhaps biting off more than one can chew. His search, like Sandhya's in the last scene, will have to continue.

C.K. MEENA