Quality Street sets off a laughing bomb

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Well-known contemporary Indian theatre personality Maya Krishna Rao recently brought the house down at Kolkata’s Park Hotel, inducing some ear-splitting belly-laughs and crunchy candid punches on her way. The stage was set for a lively play to be showcased as part of the ongoing The Park’s New Festival Edition V, 2011 — a national-cultural extravaganza. It goes without saying that she could efficaciously enthral the discerning theatre buffs of the City of Joy. And quite sagaciously tickled their funny bones with her ceaseless laughathon in an hour-long comedy called Quality Street.
Based on the delightful eponymous short-story of globally-acclaimed young Nigerian award-winning author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the performance ensured a packed hall and was expectantly rendered in a spunky, spirited and refreshingly breezy fashion. The comedy also boasted of some judiciously employed sound-effects, deftly manoeuvred by an able sound engineer. The plotline has a universal appeal in the sense that it perfectly pitches in the present-day concerns about composite cultures. With minor modifications, the premise can be fitted into any given urban setting on earth. The USP of the show was that Rao could proficiently switch gears between the two protagonists — a mother and her daughter, thereby essaying both the characters with a crystal-clear conviction. The audience in the process got to witness a non-stop “boxing match” between a mom and her daughter, which was both exciting and moving at the same time.
The distinctive feature of this stage practitioner is that she lends a new dimension to today’s modern Indian theatrescape.
Both on and off the stage, Rao acts, sings, raps, dances, writes her own scripts, directs herself and is one of the very few women stand-up comic queens, reigning the current-day comic scene in the country. She is also the visiting faculty at the National School of Drama (New Delhi), where she teaches acting. Her shows have navigated the world-cultural belts and are prudently stocked with dark, wicked humour as well as replenished with a range of themes that go from a random item in the morning newspapers to ancient Indian musicologist, sage Bharata Muni’s Natyashastra. To cut a long story short, she indiscriminately covers and measures the entire gamut of political and the social, factual and the fanciful, spiritual and philosophical.
Her acting prowess sees her enact the character of Mrs Njoku with practised ease. She not only looks her part to the tee but also her costumes come in handy to levitate her believable stylised histrionics and idiosyncrasies. For the daughter Sochienne, only her mannerisms are more than sufficient to tingle the ribs and cause a stir among the spectators. Plus, a loud, sharp, piercingly bloated voice with a stressed-on staccato at every word being pronounced is an extra comic element to heavily strike the laughter gong.
An edgy mother with a scowl on her brow and her grouchy disposition make her balk at every step being taken by her daughter very calculatively. The play opens to an affected tea-session between the mum-daughter duo, who simultaneously engage into a free-wheeling tête-a-tête over a piping-hot cuppa. The brawls and the bickering start flowing in thick and fast and the storyline slowly unties its threads.
Sochienne just returned home, having completed her studies in the US. Apparently, she looks changed as living abroad has given her a brand new perception. But at the same time, it has also strangely brought her close to her roots. While the mother is Western in a starkly colonial way and the stage is set for a clash of two belligerent women. There is a surprising twist in the tale towards the end though.
“It’s a mother-daughter story which revolves around their relationship, its quirky equations, constant cat-fights and caterwauling rifts — emanating from no rhyme or reason whatsoever. Well, it could be argued that their own follies, foibles, snobbery and a big generation gap play a trouble-shooter and lay the basis of their problems, only adding more fuel to the erupting fire in the process,” elucidates Rao. “The daughter is a foreign-returned overly hep girl and that too from the land of great opportunities — America — with the huge baggage of a gigantic American dream on her head, while the mother is comfortably ensconced in the mediocrity of her Nigerian life,” she explains further.
The play entails an amazing take on ageing parents and their growing up children, mature enough to think on their own feet and be worldly-wise. Barring the setting, props and costumes — typical of a foreign country — the plotline otherwise aptly applies to any given Indian scenario or an urban sequence under the sun. Be it Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru or a Kolkata-centric story spun around a middle-class family, the story can smoothly fit in like a palm in its glove.
“It’s true that today’s younger generation embraces different values in life, weighs and looks at things from a different perspective and in turn, possess radically contrasting notions about their place-and-position from their parents. They at times dwell on absolute opposite poles from their unconditional nurturers, guardians or constant caregivers,” observes Rao.
Produced from the stable of Vismayah, which was founded by Rao almost two decades ago in 1993, Quality Street is a well-acclaimed play that first took to stage for this currently held fest in New Delhi, followed with a successful show hosted in Kolkata and then back-to-back presentations lodged in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Chennai.
As an icing on the cake, the versatile prima-donna is accompanied by live sound, generated from the adjoining arena. She keeps interacting with the playing musician, seated adjacent to the dais in the middle of her performance, more often than not. Ordering him to stop abruptly and then start all over again is quite an amusing exercise on her part. And this facetious action frequently incites a lot of cackles and chortles among the assembled audience. Her vibes with the sound designer however, never deviate from the main theme of the play. Rather it spices up the piece as an intermittent comic interlude which is an added bonus.
Eliciting a rousing round of applause, a standing ovation and appreciation at the curtain call, Quality Street adeptly married satire with farce, reality with fantasy, proscenium with the site-specific format, Kathak dance with high-voltage histrionics, plus a wide-ranged voice modulation with phases of composed, controlled acting.
Thus the graph fluctuates off and on along the performance-scale, making the audience wary of the actor’s next move. Keeping the onlookers’ eyes wide open and sometimes, popping in speechless stupefaction, the comic presentation oscillates to and fro between pure jests and sarcastic jeers. The comedy is in-your-face and sometimes, hard-hitting with no superficial pretence at all. It induces the fun-element to cause some seat-rocking peals of laughter and occasional guffaws, drawn from an unadulterated, witty humour.