A bright young woman (Sheena Khalid) finds herself shortchanged by life, as all her time is commandeered into taking care of her bedridden and increasingly irascible mother. An investment-banker-type (Tushar Pandey) gives into the frenzied high of a jet-setting lifestyle spent on flights to foreign destinations, but it all but catches up with him in the end. A compulsive spender (Shivani Tanksale) works up huge debts even as she keeps up the facade of a luxurious lifestyle in which every status symbol (from Persian carpets to teapots with tea-leaf infusers) is a must-have. These are the denizens we encounter in Fly By Night , a new devised play from the Patchworks Ensemble, that has been helmed by Rachel D’Souza and Puja Sarup. The latter also plays Aunty, the head honcho of a clandestine operation that whisks the aforementioned people (and others like them) away from the petty neuroses and deeper malaises that afflict them, to unknown destinies hand-picked by her. The play was inspired by the real-life phenomenon of ‘evaporated’ Japanese folk, or johatsu, who disappear each year to live ‘off the grid’, with all traces of their previous existence carefully obliterated. This is certainly a very fetching production, with well-lit visuals, and quick spiffy transitions.
Character sketches
As is now de rigueur for a Patchworks production, the cast is given to a confidence of articulation and spirited on-stage manoeuvres that attempt to capture the play’s themes with both humour and pathos. Neil Bhoopalam as a yoga instructor who’s done the ‘vanished’ drill, is given the play’s show-stopping monologue, in an early morning sprint across an indistinct city-scape, accompanied only by the beats of an ennui-laden score. An actor who uses his own personality well, Bhoopalam hilariously references What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami and employs a faux Americanised spiel that’s almost become a schtick. But at some point, his turn is no longer sleight of hand but a breathtaking entrée into the vulnerabilities that afflict even the most upbeat of cheerleaders. Getting under the skin of more fleshed-out but equally susceptible characters, Khalid and Pandey are also in top form — not immune to the comedic gag, but always grounding their alter egos in the stifling actuality that foreshadows their own ‘vanishing’. Indeed, one of the play’s most affecting scenes is that final one, when the three are trundled away in the back of a truck to their new lives.
A stellar start to Fly By Night segues into a series of comic set-pieces that are funny but inconsequential. After such asides, or ‘scenes of disappearance’, we get a denouement that seems rather abrupt, but one cannot deny the scene’s poetic beauty, and the adrenaline of escape that it captures purely through the truthfulness of its committed actors. Their flight is punctuated with the bars of Nina Simone’s ‘Ain't Got No - I Got Life’, a politically charged anthem that the play hasn’t yet earned.
An apt approach
The production certainly benefits from Sarup’s formidable stage presence. She tackles the part of Aunty with lashings of imperial motherliness and a trace of Machiavelli, ensconced in the noir setting of a grand old Parsi café that is both welcoming and forbidding. Yet, there is also the flippancy of lax characterisation, and like others, she remains a cipher at best. Sarup’s improvised humour is always audience-friendly and here, it comes laced with melancholia and bitterness. That’s indeed the right tone to strike for a dark piece such as this, but she never quite attains the aureola of a messiah for the disaffected, or the ‘Buddha in Hell’ persona Bhoopalam’s character swears by so insistently. At the very outset, there is a glimpse of her own leap of faith years ago, no doubt egged on by the agents provocateur of her time, but her motivations remain hazy.
The play deals with ordinary mortals, but they are given the allure of libertarian superheroes with moulted identities and a spectacular interiority, and possibly an origins tale tucked away somewhere. It cannot, almost as a prerequisite, reproduce what the infinite unknown may look like, because it is only what is actually intimate or immediate that must be confronted or escaped from. One suspects that a more robustly delineated narrative arc could well pull together the portents the play forewarns but doesn’t quite bring home to roost. Fly By Night does possess the assured beginnings of a piece of theatre grappling for substance. But it must veer away from lightheartedly representing a knock-your-socks-off premise towards real insight and introspection about the human condition at a time social anxieties have reached tipping point.
* The writer has worked closely with the Patchworks Ensemble on The Gentlemen’s Club .
