It can be safely said that mature romances are rather thin on the ground in an entertainment industry that thrives on youthful ardour. The love impulse never fades with age, and most people continue to yearn for connections of the heart well past the tumultuous twenties, putting themselves through the wringer of cyclical coupling and uncoupling, and emerging none the wiser for all that. Two recent stage performances, of which only one opened last week, give us a peek into love stories between those who are purportedly not anymore young, but still alive to passion and its discontents. The works are not companion pieces in the slightest, but share cadences and preoccupations. Both are two-handers — a new Indian production of Yasmina Reza’s The Unexpected Man features Naved Aslam and director Padma Damodaran, while Rewind Reverse Repeat is a devised physical theatre piece performed by Shruti Mishra and Manish Chaudhari.
Elegant staging
Reza’s play, not unsurprisingly, wears its smartness on its sleeve. Its characters are strangers on a train. Aslam plays high-brow novelist Parsky, and Damodaran is Martha, who is loathe to reveal she’s an ardent fan of his work. For much of the play’s running time, it is their inner thoughts that are spoken out loud, creating a world of connections in an impasse that might never be breached. The exquisite lighting by Deepa Dharmadhikari, and the frequent reconfiguring of the play’s spatial frames of reference etches both individuals in intimate detail, even as they remain ensconced in their seats.
It is an elegant staging, and the actors fit right in sartorially. Aslam’s Parsky is handed a litany of predilections but the actor plays him, not as an curmudgeon, but as someone quite forlorn in his own right. His musings, even if expressly directed at Martha, never seems centred upon her, but scattered into the space betwixt and beyond, unlike the manner in which Martha’s gaze appears to be fixated on her idol.
This interplay allows us to acutely view the writer’s narcissism, not as something unsightly, but as an essential quality of his craft that still attracts legions of readers aeons more empathetic than he, as Martha indubitably is. Aslam takes his time settling in, but ends up delivering an accurately pitched Parsky with his rough edges in place. Damodaran flounders with the humour at her disposal, and her thought blurbs are more pensive than animated. The tonal shift that marks the characters’ thoughts giving way to conversation is therefore all the more welcome. Here, in one final moment of surrender, Martha blurts out her true allegiance — belying her dyed-in-the-wool persona and casting herself to the wind as someone with reserves of passion. Although The Unexpected Man doesn’t quite soar and never evokes the ‘nostalgia for things that have never happened’ it promises, it is a piquant window into the lives of those around us who are the most reticent and, therefore, all the more captivating.
Breaking apart
While that play ends with the hope and conjecture, in Rewind Reverse Repeat , in which Mishra and Chaudhari play a couple in the throes of a subtly beautiful divorce, life comes full circle. Once again, the woman in the piece follows the man’s gaze, but he remains inscrutable and self-sufficient, in an elemental rather than toxic sense, which might offer a clue to their impending parting of ways. Mishra is stoic and just a whisker jaded, standing witness to the slow ebbing of a relationship that has simply slipped through her fingers, giving us a sense of a lifetime lived and lost.
The piece is full of set-pieces that, figuratively, evoke the fraying of a string of pearls pulled from Mishra’s neck and scattered across the floor, much like a relationship gone awry. Occupying the tantalising space between dance and movement, the actors work with bursts of performance, each vignette remaining unsettlingly unresolved. The pearls are never gathered but anything more calculated, or chiselled to perfection, might fly in the face of an amorphous work that teeters at the edge of misty-eyed nostalgia for things that have taken place but seem unlikely to reoccur. When the actors act as their characters’ children, more than highlighting a messy divorce’s collateral takings, they become alter-egos for themselves in happier, more innocent, times. While The Unexpected Man conspires quite ingeniously to bring kindred spirits together, Rewind Reverse Repeat attempts to fashion an escape from the utter loneliness of togetherness.
