Picture courtesy: Kyle Adler
Archana Asthana
Disguised as a whodunit, “The Play That Goes Wrong” seems to have everything going right for it. Produced by Naatak as the last play of its 30th season, it continues until the next weekend at Cubberly Theater. Written by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, the longest running play in Westend, and then on Broadway, the play demanded some appropriate culturalization for the Indian audience which, director Vikas Dhurka does with aplomb.
In the first half, the befuddled audience witnessed what they thought were completely unprepared, unrehearsed actors and actions until the layers unraveling revealed the choreographed chaos. Introduced as “Band, Baja, Bloodshed; Murder in the Malhotra Manor’, the play within a play from the Natak Drama Company production, a spoof on their own company name set the stage for the ensuing mayhem. Even before the curtain rose, we see characters searching for lost dogs and stage managers trying to fix props in full view of audience, adding to their confusion.
When Chirag Malhotra (Ankit Dhingra) is found murdered in his mansion, a week before his wedding, the real fun starts with the arrival of the bumbling Inspector Chaturvedi (Harish Agastya), who sets out to interview the list of suspects, topped by the dead man’s fiancée (Pranya Nagpal), her brother (Surender Singh), as well as Chirag’s brother (Kaushik Karalgikar). Suspicion also bounces off other key characters.. the Diwan (Dilip Ratnam), and even the gardener! By now, the expectations of ineptness by the cast are set. Rehearsed rejoinders to dialogue not uttered create out of sync movements, even as the dialogues gets even more mixed up when the pages in the script get shuffled, leading to hilarious outcomes.
Even the stage manager and other production crew get pulled into acting on stage when the leading ladies keep having concussions and need to be replaced. Vignettes such as monotonous dialogue delivery as the script is read, not emoted; dead pan faces; the repetitive loop when one actor messes up the lines and keeps restarting; arrival of the gardener with only a leash as his dog is still missing (the one he was looking for before the show started); are numerous and each brought the house down with its intended hilarity.
The props keep dismantling and are hurriedly replaced with human ones. The sets design and manager (Asheesh Divetia, Saket Karve) deserve special kudos for constructing an ensemble where the controlled disaster is staged to perfection: the collapse of an upper story with actors on it; the imaginative use of light and sound to depict a moving and stuck elevator; the creative use of the couch which ends up handcuffed to a character; candles held by a person when the mantle falls away..
The actors deserve accolades for delivering the extreme physicality that this slapstick comedy demanded. From the kinesthetic choreography of sword duels to hysterical Bollywood dance numbers, efforts to get the corpses off the stage, the characters acted definitely out of character.
Amidst the ramshackle set, corpses coming to life, actors forgetting lines, female characters portrayed by males, the comedy is at heart a murder mystery which is eventually solved! Naatak has lived up to its reputation of staging a class act once again!
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