Sutradhar and Vinay Varma rarely disappoint with their offerings. Andhere Mein, based on Pratap Sehgal’s Indian adaptation in Hindi of Peter Shaffer’s ‘Black Comedy’ and sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, the Government of India continues that tradition. It is not one of their best, but it still manages to give the audience some good laughs.
The dark comedy revolves around a budding sculptor Rahul Mehta (Rahim Amirali), who along with his girlfriend (Ratika Sant Keswani) steals some valuable (read antique) pieces of furniture from his friend and neighbour’s apartment (Ganesh Nallari as Jolly Peters). He does this to impress a prospective buyer of his sculptures Nawab Wajid Ali Khan Bahadur, and also his girlfriend’s rather uptight, army disciplinarian father (Vinay Varma wonderfully dons this hat, literally, along with the director’s), both due to visit them on the same evening.
Unfortunately, a power outage leaves them in pitch blackness with everyone stumbling around. Things go from bad to worse when Jolly returns early from his trip and Sheetal (Deepti Girotra), a lady Rahul has been hobnobbing with unbeknownst to Roshni, decides to visit him. An annoying, overtalkative and inebriated neighbour (Rita Ghosh as Nibedita) and an electrician (George Rakesh) mistaken for being the Nawab himself and with a penchant for poetry and art, complete the massive set of characters befuddling themselves and others around them in the dark.
A scene of the play
The play should be lauded for using several innovative theatrical techniques, reverse lighting being one – when the characters are in dark, the audience could see them, and when the characters have light, the stage is automatically dimmed. There were also funny freeze-frame moments, all characters freeze while just one conversation goes on in the background. The play mainly revolves around the travails of conjuring false prestige and is a kaleidoscope into how things could backfire when one tries to put on a fake image.
The characters on the stage are lively, with Rahim bringing in some laughs – especially when he is sweating it out placing back the stolen goods in his friend’s apartment - but Vinay Varma, as usual, was the show-stealer, evoking laughter quite often, as he went on his rant against ‘bloody civilians’. The play did get loud at times and a little tacky – not sure if the sexual innuendoes were intentional - although such moments aren’t too stretched out. There was always a light-hearted moment around the corner.
The dark comedy doesn’t meander into philosophical musings of a didactic nature, a relief considering the direction taken by quite a few other plays in recent times. The makers also managed to squeeze in a hat tip to ‘shayari’ while invoking some laughs around poetry. There were allusions to homosexuality – minus crass homophobic jokes– and also the current West Bengal political drama. All in all, it is quite a watchable play that ran for a little over an hour, and for the most part will keep you entertained, if you aren’t looking for anything deep.