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Playing with fire

What is to be done with Sathe is a careful portrayal of human fear and intellectual jealousies

The sets of “What is to be done with Sathe?” staged by Chennai’s Theatre Nisha might give one the impression of a bedroom comedy – of suspicious affairs and tugging jealousy. But the English translation of Marathi playwright R ajeev Naik’s “Sathecha Kay Karaicha?”, staged at Ranga Shankara last weekend, was anything but that.

A cigarette butt slowly gleamed in the darkness and the spotlight beamed on the protagonist, Abhay an ad-filmmaker, played by National School of Drama alumnus, V. Balakrishnan.

Abhay’s constant cloud of worry and despair is the ubiquitous “Sathe” who he is obsessed with. Sathe is, in many ways, the nagging self-created block in our insecure lives – the ‘person’ who always gets to do the things you’d want to before you do them and gets all the credit. The person who, as Abhay disdainfully says, is always “at the right place, at the right time with the right contacts.” Sathe instils in him the middle-class frustration of feeling under-achieved and envious.

Fluid and catchy dialogues between Abhay and his lecturer-wife Salma (Janani) that the audience could easily identify with made the play engaging. When Janani refuses to go to America for a holiday because of how the country has oppressed the Native Americans and the African Americans, Abhay jumps at her hypocrisy arguing that her Aryan ancestors are equally to blame for their treatment of the Adivasis and Dravidians in the country. One but could help but commend the easy-going chemistry that the two actors shared as a couple.

What was interesting is that the inter-religious mix of the couple was never an issue, thereby giving the play a secular mindset.

The reference to Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” and Robert Browning’s “Dramatic Monologues” by Salma not only reinstated her position as an English Literature lecturer, but also elicited a few laughs at the disconnect of its mere mention in her animated conversation with her husband.

While Balakrishnan was loud and clear, Janani could have thrown her voice at the audience with greater force. The tracing of the self-destruction of Abhay was nicely drawn out, but up to a point. The lines seemed repetitive and the gaps between scenes were prolonged enough to make a member of the audience yawn loudly in boredom – which again was uncalled for.

One felt having a crew member walk on in between scenes to shift props around, adding just a book or two was completely unavoidable; it could have been done by the actors themselves and would have made the 90 minute play more compact.

While Abhay changed his clothes for every scene, so that each change accounted for a day, Salma changed only once – making it seem imbalanced and uncoordinated. The accents were more or less maintained – but there were a few slip-ups here and there in the diction.

But the pressure to be oneself and to perform was depicted well by Balakrishnan who was also the play’s director. Despite the fact that there were just two characters in the play, any notions of inadequacy were taken care of by the all-pervasive “Sathe” who dominated the central thought of the protagonist. Abhay’s monologue which highlights the struggle with his identity was well-delivered.

“What is to be done with Sathe?” evoked the “angry young man” in John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” in a sense, where Abhay’s invading discontent and sarcasm almost “had him sell his soul to the devil”.

The play is the careful portrayal of human fears and intellectual jealousies in a typical urban middle-class lifestyle where ambitions and the desire for fame and recognition are well-scripted.

AYESHA MATTHAN

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