This Will Only Take Several Minutes sounds like one of those familiar phrases peculiar to the Indian condition. Typically we hear ‘a few’ instead of ‘several’, but it almost always means the opposite. Submerged in that obsequiousness is the tacit acknowledgement, at both ends, that waiting in itself is one of life’s eternal occupational hazards. Whether it is in languorous queues for disappearing cash or in the utter drudge of file-pushing that is still the bane of public offices or in the oppressive stillness of the daily commute, time can be stretched ad infinitum yet still trip by on rosy wings, never within one’s grasp.
Urban ennui in India is all about tail-flicking and dust and heat baked like niblets into the noise and chaos and clutter constantly swirling around us.
This Will Only Take Several Minutes is also the title of a new play that is a meditation on urban ennui in the digital age. Written and directed by Suguru Yamamoto and Neel Chaudhuri, it is a collaboration between the well-regarded Delhi-based Tadpole Repertory founded by Chaudhuri, and Yamamoto’s Hanchu-Yuei, an accomplished theatre collective from Japan. It will be staged in Mumbai this week, fresh from an opening run at Bengaluru over the past weekend. Its Japanese title translates as 2 a.m. Coffee Cup Salad Bowl Utopia , perhaps alluding to the emptiness of the night that embraces the disaffected denizens of big Japanese cities, where listlessness is like the slow drone of a bass key pressed down long enough. Set in a ‘city not far from yours’, but still attempting to bridge urban cultures in two megapolises, Tokyo and Delhi, separated by several time zones and at least one long-haul flight, the play is certainly not without ambition. It is a take on alienation in two languages, yet sharing a single performance grammar that acquires a fluency via the acculturated bodies of intrepid actors trying to convey very local ideas that are also quite discernibly universal.
Chaudhuri’s first encounter with Yamamoto’s practice was at the 2014 edition of TPAM (Tokyo Performing Arts Market), an international creative networking hub organised in Yokohama, where he presented a paper on his group’s focus on innovating new texts in India. Yamamoto had pulled off a major breakthrough creatively with his Girl X , an acclaimed performance piece in which digital projections interacted inventively with actors’ bodies, and achieved a compelling similitude with the lives of Japan’s gadget-obsessed generation. A workshop in Delhi involving both groups in 2015 was a non-starter, because of issues of translation; members of the Hanchu-Yuei group spoke little English.
Early last year, with support from the Japan Foundation, Yamamoto was able to tour India with his production Colors of Our Blood , with fixtures in Delhi and Kerala. A remarkable production with its own ebbs and flows — the reception in Kerala was mixed — it furthered the idea of a digital consciousness as an entity distinct from the body. This came to a head in a deeply affecting denouement where, as I had written then: “in an after-world of humanoids (or, as easily, Internet avatars) empathy and love can live on forever (or more aptly, in an endless loop) in small disfigured ways, even if merely programmed in”. An interaction between the groups in Delhi, where Tadpole acted as local guides, got them off to a fresh start, and the timeline for an exciting new collaboration was put in place.
While there has been an endless exchange of thematic material in the interim period, the production has come together during a four-week process in Delhi over the past month. The visitors have been receptive to the Tadpole Repertory’s distinctive style of storytelling via vignettes, last seen in their production NDLS, a series of comedy sketches about the big bad city in which they live. Similarly, the rooted physicality of the Japanese performers is something Chaudhuri’s actors have attempted to emulate. What the production has also acquired is the state-of-the-art technical hijinks that is a feature of Yamamoto’s work.
The writer is a playwright and stage critic
This Will Only Take Several Minuteswill be staged at Sitara Studio on January 25 and 26 at 8 p.m. Entry is free, but seats must be reserved by writing to reservations.tadpole@gmail.com
