All For Love:
Manav Kaul has written and directed a play after a while, and it is always good to see a theatreperson move away to screen fame and return, refreshed, and perhaps enriched by the experience. Tumhaare Baare Mein is lightweight compared to his earlier plays, as if he wanted to enjoy the process of staging a play, and escape the solitary toil of writing.
He has called it a devised piece, and that improvised quality comes through—right from the musical chairs-like opening sequence to the unexpected ending. It requires the actors to be limber, to catch the various moods of the characters, as well as the small bursts of physicality required of them.
Tumhaare Baare Mein is set in a café, with six chairs and a screen where a few moments are seen in shadow play; in this space, three couples at various stages of their relationship are meeting—one pair has just connected on a dating site, the other two are experiencing the strains caused by their differences. There is much discussion on the preference for hot or cold coffee and changing tastes, as though a romantic connection or distancing, as the case may be, is based on tiny choices.
Not much really ‘happens’ for most of the play, but there is a whimsical quality to the interactions between the couples. The audience has already noticed the sheets of paper strewed on the stage—the explanation comes with a welcome burst of humour. The café used to host open mics, that’s why customers stopped coming, as a man explains to the woman with him. And because the sound of the poems leaked from the walls, the property rates of the flats nearby fell, and the bazaar outside also folded up. This comment on the dwindling popularity of poetry is apropos of nothing, but is amusing nonetheless.
Kaul takes a look at the social media obsession, that dictates how everything, even broken bonds, must be recorded. The women are looking for more than just stability in a relationship, though the metaphor Kaul uses, that of flying, is a bit hackneyed. To suggest than men and women not want different things, he likens the male attitude to that of a penguin, that has wings but is unable to fly.
Through the confusion of the characters he does convey the impassable maze that is the current urban relationship landscape, that needs therapy and constant validation through social media to get through. Though there is nothing novel about the idea itself, Kaul imbues it with a wistfulness, and shards of poetry interspersing the prosaic coffee-date chatter.
Priyanka Chowdhary, Mansi Bhawalkar, and Sakhi Gokhale portray the women trying to figure out the vagaries of love and express their need desire to break free; the men played by Kaustub Harit, Ghanshyam Lalsa, and Rishabh Kanti cannot quite find their place in this rejigged equation of coupledom, or forego the past. It is up to the actors to balancing the absurd with the realistic in Manav Kaul’s writing and they do a fine job of it. Tumhaare Baare Mein is watchable for its moments of sudden clarity that emerge from the possibly deliberate wanderings into whimsy.
(This piece first appeared in mumbaitheatreguide.com)
