Two productions with international antecedents will be staged in Mumbai this week. Almost flying under the radar, French group Theatre Bascule’s rousing physical theatre piece, Zoom Dada, will be a one-off show staged this evening as another stop in a roughly month-long nationwide tour facilitated primarily by L’Alliance Française. Elsewhere, British playwright Nick Payne’s celebrated Constellations embarks on a limited opening run, as part of what has been billed as the NCPA Theatre Season. Directed by Bruce Guthrie, the two-hander features local talent Mansi Multani and Jim Sarbh, and a top-notch international crew.
Seasonal changes
Although it hasn’t been formally announced, the NCPA Theatre Season appears to have replaced the venue’s annual Centrestage Festival of premiering plays. The multi-lingual festival enjoyed a eight-year-long innings, and had seen the premieres of significant productions like Akarsh Khurana’s Baghdad Wedding , Purva Naresh’s Aaj Rang Hai and the Patchworks Ensemble’s Ila , although the law of averages was catching up with it. The new season features three productions, all directed by international directors, marking a cultural shift for the venue with some ramifications for a cash-strapped local theatre scene. Apart from Constellations , Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives will be helmed by Andy Packer of the Australian Slingsby Theatre Company, and Paul Goodwin will direct an Indian cast (top-lined by Kalki Koechlin) in Lucrece , after having opened an earlier production at last year’s Centrestage. The play is based on William Shakespeare’s narrative poem ‘The Rape of Lucrece’.
Travelling emotions
Constellations opened in the West End in 2012, and on Broadway in 2015, and has encountered no shortage of encomiums during a six-year journey that has seen productions in countries as far-flung as China and Australia. Described as a ‘sophisticated date play’, it is a tender romance between imaginative cosmologist Marianne and earthy beekeeper Roland. Multani, an actor with spring and vivacity, steps into the enviable shoes of actresses like tragicomic stars like Sally Hawkins and Ginnifer Goodwin. The usually mercurial Sarbh, who nonetheless possesses the gravitas of an old soul, will likely bring an everyman appeal to a character written as a compelling figure of sturdy inhibition. One of Marianne’s areas of research is the ‘quantum multiverse’ and the play is littered with never-too-nerdy scientific references gently stretched into philosophical musings. The characters’ points of contact and departure allow them to travel a veritable epic of emotions that blurs the line between star-crossed compulsion and free will.
Impromptu portraits
In direct contrast, the premise of Zoom Dada is delightfully anarchic, almost as a nod to Dadaism — the artistic movement to which it partly owes its name, although the connotations of the word ‘dada’ (a colloquial term for a child’s hobby-horse in French) for an Indian audience is decidedly different. In the play, two characters played by Stephane Fortin and Iliass Mjouti run out of ideas as they attempt to create an impromptu portrait of themselves almost out of thin air, it would seem. Using a mix of movement, dance and non-verbal gesticulations, the duo wrestle with the eternal search for inspiration and demonstrate what one might do if confronted with sporadic bursts of it. Apart from Dadism, the play is inspired by the all-too-accessible art of photography and cinema of the burlesque.
Together, Fortin and Mjouti, with technical assistance from Samuel Deschamps, delineate a 40-minute physical performance that is, on the surface, marked with epic failure and hilarious irrationality which, of course, can only be achieved by a great degree of precision and skills. Theatre Bascule is based out of Normandy, France and Zoom Dada is a 2015 piece that has completed more than 385 shows. In India, they have already performed in Chandigarh, Thiruvananthapuram, Chennai and Bengaluru and their tour is expected to last till December 2. The show is suitable to children above the age of three.
Constellations will stage this evening onwards until November 25 at Experimental Theatre, NCPA and Zoom Dada will be performed this evening at G5A Foundation for Contemporary Culture at 7.30 p.m.; for more details on both productions see bookmyshow.com
