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A four on five
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The stage version of Five Point Someone was rather competent
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Photo : E. Lakshmi Narayanan
MINOR GLITCHES All three protagonists needed to be surer of themselves and their roles
When talking about The Madras Players’ stage version of Chetan Bhagat’s “Five Point Someone”, one should first get out of the way questions about the content. Simply put, one should only watch this play if one likes the author
’s style of writing or the genre of “lad-lit” in general.
But within that framework, this stage version, which was brought last weekend to Bangalore by Evam, does its job rather competently. Adapted to the stage by Nikhila Kesavan, who also directs the play, the script is a rather nice compression of over 250 pages of text into two hours of stage time. With an older, hindsight-equipped author-narrator (played by Vidyuth S.) filling in the gaps, the play carefully picks and chooses all the right moments from the novel.
It plays out rather entertainingly too – relaxed and easy, much like the character of Ryan (Praveen Bharadwaj), whose dislike of the system and much else is the primary catalyst for all the misadventures in the book. For anyone who enjoyed the original book, the play is just as chock-full of similar humour, which had much of the audience at Chowdiah in splits. And the rest of it moves quickly enough, so that one doesn’t overly feel the burden of a novel while watching the play.
The performance was not without difficulties, however. All three protagonists needed to be surer of themselves and their roles, particularly Praveen, whose portrayal of Ryan began on a rather wooden note. By comparison, Abhijeet “Monty” Mohanty as Hari and Sarvesh Sridhar as Alok were more believable. However, while Abhijeet managed his scenes with Praveen and Sarvesh fairly well, his scenes with Uttara Krishnadas as Neha Cherian, Hari’s girlfriend, lacked chemistry, with the couple seeming unclear on how to play off each other. The result was that many of these scenes weren’t convincing enough, especially where emotional transitions within the scene were involved. The rest of the cast were far more satisfactory, making more of an impact in shorter amounts of time.
Moreover, while some scene changes were necessary, one felt that there were far too many cuts in the action, causing the play to lose a certain amount of dynamism that could easily have been retained if the jumps in story were done more fluidly.
Still, for the audience, most of whom seemed fans of Bhagat, the play seemed to capture accurately the mood and thrust of the novel. As far as adaptations go, a nice transition from page to stage, and one to watch for anyone who’s ever said that “Five Point Someone” is one of their favourite reads.
RAKESH MEHAR
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