JOIN USComedy and melodrama can win the hearts of the audience. This was amply proved when Play Pen presented ‘Marry Go Round’, as part of the Deccan Herald Theatre Festival, recently. It is directed by acclaimed theatre artist Ashish Sen adapting from Sadiqa Peerbhoy’s novel.
‘Marry Go Round’ offers a hilarious take on arranged marriages, set in Hyderabad. Sartaj Jehan, a determined mother using blatant emotional blackmail to inveigle her NRI son into a marriage with the ‘khandani’ girl. Sartaj is concerned about seeing the ancestral family continue. Her late father in-law visits her dreams only to propagate that she hasn't done enough to build the family line. The reluctant son with a live-in girlfriend follows him all the way to India. The mother lines up the wrongest possible girl that son is disinterested in.
The story takes hilarious twists and turns, and we have a heady cocktail of an arranged wedding that morphs into a love marriage with a little tactical help from long-dead ancestors.
Hilarious actions, dialogues and quirky characters define the humour of the play. Sartaj Jehan played by Rubi Chakravarti was one of the most interesting and amusing characters in the play. The play is not only a comical take on arranged marriages but dwells deep into the multi-cultural identities and the generation gap. Witty lines like ‘Only dirty people bathe and do you believe in love at first touch?’ garnered applause and the audience was completely hooked on till the end.
When asked why Ashish Sen, the director of the play, considered adapting ‘Marry Go Round’, the novel, into a play, he said, “The book is really funny and Sadiqa has dealt with important issues like arranged marriages in the Indian context. When I read the book I was quite hooked. I spoke to Sadiqa if she would consider the book to be adapted into a play. She agreed and there we go!”
A touch of live music and original music was Ashish’s idea of turning a novel into an entertaining enactment. “I have tried to taken the essence of the book that is arranged marriage and have linked it to our physic be it Hindi cinema, spoof on Indian comedy, Hinglish, merging the past and the present and localising a bit more than the original novel. I have learnt a lot from this production and it has been great fun directing this play.”
What was more amazing was when the audience got to meet the writer herself, Sadiqa Peerbhoy, who was enthralled after watching her own novel become a play and which turned out to be brilliant than what she had expected. “I was a little apprehensive when Ashish told me that he would adapt my novel into a play. Butt after watching the play I feel it added more value to the novel, which is amazing.” For those of you who missed this hilarious play have another chance to catch it at Rangashankara on March 10, 7.30 pm and Jagriti on March 5 and 6 at 7.30 pm