The National Centre for Perfoming Arts and
Arpana presentation of ‘Club Desire’ was the fundraiser event for the Blind
Society of Goa on September 27, 2015 at the Kala Academy auditorium.
The director, Sunil Shanbag, and the young
female writer, Sapan Saran, establish from the very outset that this is a
gritty, direct-in-the-face capturing of the essence of the ‘Carmen’ story in
the context of modern India.
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The Desire Club owner kick starts the
action with his favourite F word and splatters it across his limited 300-word
vocabulary throughout the play in a very energetic and colourful performance.
This on-the-ball man of action who prides himself on achieving so much with so
little brought to life the successful Indian entrepreneurs of small businesses.
In contrast, Jayam, poet, author, well read and totally in command of sentence
structure and word meanings, is out of sync with the pulsating world of clubs,
dance music and free love. The clash of characters generates a sprinkling of
laughs unheard of in previous versions of the intensely passionate story of
destructive love that characterises the original ‘Carmen’ opera by Bizet.
The music of Bizet’s opera has captivated
music lovers everywhere for a long, long time; nonetheless, the music here
composed by Suhaas Ahuja and Rohan Hastak plugs into the new Indian urban punk
rock and electronic dance music with hard hitting rhythmic underpinning and
throbbing pulse. The musicians on-stage created the Club Desire context with
zest.
The teasing, taunting, irrepressible Carmen
is replaced by Chahat, free-spirited, morally unconventional, provocative and
unattainable to any man. Palomi Ghosh steps into this role that fits her like a
tight glove. Palomi breathes Chahat inside out and amazingly brings to the
surface numerous insights into the character of the original Carmen.
Sapan Saran has created a more complex
portrayal of a liberated woman based on Carmen in an innovative up-to-date
rewrite in the modern social and cultural context. Palomi who is loved for
projecting the essence of Goa’s greatest singer in an uncanny life size
portrayal in ‘Nachom-ia Kumpasar’, repeats the magic here with a vibrantly
alive creation of Chahat.
Palomi’s entry and her first song hit the
hot spot with gusto. The music is loud and Palomi’s voice with its wide dynamic
range and her gyrating, arm-swinging,’pull-out-all-stops’ body movements
reinforce and punctuate the music. She’s playing to a live audience and she
keeps them entranced with her dynamism and charisma.
Jayam and Chahat belong to
mutually-exclusive worlds. They meet and sparks fly and an unusual, passionate,
obsessive love engulfs them, but soon divisions on notions of language, love,
sex, morality and freedom pull them apart.
The wonderful song ‘Heart is a Verb’ is
very touching. Chahat’s songs, with the lyrics written by Arundhati Subramaniam
thrown up on a screen was an integral part, echoing the inner reality of the
events.
The entry of DJ Abeer, a successful
producer and performer of electronic dance music, creates the tragic love
triangle with the ousted Jayam, desperately clinging to his love, out for
revenge. Failure shadows him to the tragic end.
His entry also ushers in discussion on
creativity. These spirited arguments, brilliantly scripted, on love, sex,
morality, fatherhood, mother love, freedom, language, creativity, music,
expressive sounds build up the conflicts and congruences between the characters
and are a unique feature of the play. The predictable outcome is given a
delicious twist with the Armadillo song written by Asif Ali Baig, based on a
Bolivian fable. It frames the central story with a lovable whimsical touch and
brings a satisfying twist at the end.
The entire team from the young writer to
the old experienced director, the stunning Palomi and her fellow actors, the
musicians and all the crew came together to give us an unusual theatre
experience.
