This weekend, the play Ladies Compartment featuring an all-women cast and crew makes its debut in Hyderabad. In the play, a wide variety of women from different walks of life — a domestic help, a corporate professional, a socialite, a widow and a police officer — share interesting anecdotes while driving home a message. The play is set against a Delhi Metro backdrop.
A brainchild of Pooja Pandey (a physiotherapist off stage), the play came through after she observed various auditions that restricted the entry for actors to under-30 bracket. She kept wondering why age should matter for theatre, where younger actors could play older roles and vice versa. Ladies Compartment is her bid to challenge such stereotypes. In fact she wanted to come up with a play that would feature women actors in their mid-30s and yet be successful.
The start was far from easy. Pooja didn’t want actors who would give ‘traffic jam’ excuses to her rehearsals, given the distances actors have to travel in Bengaluru. Instead she picked neighbours from her apartment for the play, which helped her focus on the quality. The actors were apprehensive to begin with, but a rehearsal routine following early dinners helped the play came to life . These actors (including Kalyani Menon, Usha Rao, Imran Pasha, Mini Raj, Lakshmi Ram, besides Pooja) now await every opportunity to stage Ladies Compartment .
Conceived in January last year, the play’s content is updated by the team for timely references with every staging; the implementation of GST and demonetisation being the most recent ones. “That’s the reason the play continues to be entertaining every time we head onto the stage,” says Pooja.
Even though Bengaluru has been her home town for long, Pooja chose Delhi for the setting owing to her innate understanding of the city where she had spent her formative years. Her comfort in depicting the typical Haryanvi dialect and inputs from her co-writer and sister Aarti Pandey (who resides in Delhi) added credibility to her choice.
“I wanted to bring in a setting that would include people of diverse cultures and professions which usually happens in a public mode of transport. The Dehi Metro situation leaves the characters with no other option but to talk,” Pooja adds.
The narrator’s voice promises to weave in a Deccani spin too . “The fact that we don’t know how Hyderabadi audience would react to us makes it an interesting situation.” There’s only so much that one could do to weave in local elements to the play, Pooja says.
Though Pooja has acted and scripted multiple plays in the past, Ladies Compartment is one play she holds close to her heart.
Ladies Compartment will be staged at Lamakaan and Phoenix Arena on November 4 and 5, 6:30 and 8 pm respectively.
