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Same old power play

Mahesh Dattani's first play, Mad About Money, could have done with a bit more reworking to accommodate new-age parenting

PHOTO: MURALI KUMAR K.

PLAY TIME Questions about identity and selfhood never go away

Like a village bus driver who waits for the gaadi to fill up before starting the trip, those who put up Mahesh Dattani's Mad about Money last week waited for a respectable number of people to fill up the Chowdaiah Hall auditorium. The organisers were a good 25 minutes late when they commenced the show — with a DVD projection of a documentary on the sponsors. Three minutes into the screening the audience, bless their little hearts, started catcalling and clapping in that steady manner that indicates a polite form of booing. The organisers quickly cut short the commercial and announced the credits — another projection, with caricatures of cast, producer and director.

No such tamasha took place in September '88 when Dattani staged the original version of this comedy, Where There's A Will, at the same venue. It was his first play, written when he was just 20. It was a pioneering venture in English-language theatre in India. A whole generation has been born since. One wonders if the urban youth of today would find the theme dated. Would they recognise the short-tempered, overbearing Hasmukhbhai Mehta who consistently humiliates his only son Ajit, the father who wants his son to be an obedient clone with no mind of his own? My guess is that although middle-class parents no longer mercilessly bully their children, conservative business families haven't changed all that much. And questions about identity and selfhood will never go away. Of course, madness about money has only increased over the years. What about cooking as mania — the wife, Sonal, who obsessively feeds her family to hide her inner doubts? Although it is a deliberately exaggerated character, it would certainly ring a few bells among the middle-aged.

Eternal triangle

The man-wife-mistress triangle has seen numerous avatars in popular plays, replete with sexist jokes and stereotyped characters. Dattani fools the audience into expecting the play to run on predictable lines, and then yanks them by the seat of their pants. Kiran, the mistress, is not a bimbo but a company director, sharp-witted and honest, tough as nails yet capable of warmth. Mama's boy "Ajju" may be a figure of ridicule but he does try to thumb his nose at his tormentor whenever he can. Daughter-in-law Preeti is shrewdly dutiful as long as the old man is alive and puts Sonal in her place after he is gone. In the end, Kiran and Sonal join forces and deal the old man a crushing (albeit posthumous) defeat. They discover that what Hasmukh sought in his mistress was a manager who would run his life for him — in short, a father figure! Hasmukh's ghost realises too late that he had been living in his father's shadow, been his "father's ghost", all his life.

Notions about being a man and not being man enough have been questioned in this play and explored in greater depth in most of Dattani's subsequent works. While he was updating his old play by adding mobile phones and changing the ending, he could have used his blue pencil to tighten Act 1 and establish characters in fewer words. The story doesn't move forward enough in the first act, and it is almost overloaded with jokes although, one must admit, they never fall flat (my personal favourite is Sonal exclaiming brightly, "We are just middle-class people with a lot of money"). The ghost rendered into a puddle of water that gets mopped up and swished away was a nice touch. The ending is better than in the original, with the old man clearly getting a chance to be reborn. Will he rectify his flaws in his next life or will his innate nature be perpetuated through his grandson? It's a question that the audience gets to take home with them. Although veterans of Hindi television have been cast in the play they bear no taint of histrionics. There's Amar Talwar, whose credits include Shanthi, Jassi Jaisi Koi Nahin, K3G and Corporate, as the crusty Hasmukhbhai. Jayati Bhatia (Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki, Jassi, The Vagina Monologues) is the hysterical Sonal and Narayani Shastri (Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, Kkusum) the no-nonsense Kiran. With Smita Bansal and Gaurav Sharma they make up an effective and efficient team.

One appreciates the special effects created with just blue lighting and a (rather noisy) smoke machine when Hasmukh dies, and the opaque screen behind which you can see the tree (supposedly tamarind but with the large leaves of a banyan) on which the ghost likes to swing upside down. Amit Heri's music, dramatic only during the death scene, is otherwise barely noticeable, which is a good thing.

C.K. MEENA

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