All Men are like that & all women too - A review.

Priya & I caught a play over the weekend - given that I have been working evenings for the last 8 or so years & that I've been lazy and / or culturally challenged for all my life before that it's been a while since we did that. The play was "Salt & Pepper" - written & directed by Vikranth Pawar & starred Darshan Jariwala, Mandira Bedi. Kuki Grewal & Vikram Kocchar. It was set up as 9 - 10 episodes of 10 minutes each revolving around conversations between a guy & a girl at different stages of their life or relationship. I thought I would give a shot at reviewing the play - my own personal viewpoint of-course.

The last 2 occasions I went to the theater involved big, over the top musical productions with incredible production values & big name movie tie-ins - Singing In the Rain & The Producers. This was about as far away from that as you can get - the sets were simple but extremely well designed & very flexible given that they had to be subtly altered between each episode. They lighting also played an important role - highlighting the characters rather than the background & in some cases switching from character to character with the ebb & flow of the dialogue. The music was minimal - only as interludes as the episodes switched over but it was fun to mouth the half forgotten lyrics of old Beatles & Elvis songs.

The episodes themselves had a distinctly urban bias with a strong tilt towards modern relationship questions. I also detected a subtle positive thread running through the episodes - only 1 of them, the episode of the old man & woman arguing with each other entirely in their minds, ended on a slightly downbeat note. The opening episode was of a lonely urban woman contemplating suicide & her conversation with a previously unknown neighbour who tries to talk her out of it - the acting by Mandira Bedi & Darshan Jariwala was quite strong & set the right note. The episode itself was perhaps slightly predictable but the crisp dialogues kept the interest alive. In fact the dialogues were a highlight of the whole play - very witty & flowing but real at all times. The succeeding episodes were successful in keeping up the interest level & touched on different aspects of modern relationships - a young couple fighting with each other during a meeting with a marriage counseller & finding the solution to their woes themselves while doing so, a middle aged man wondering what might have been if he had taken up with his college girlfriend while talking to her in his imagination, a past secret being hilariously revealed when a couple goes through a Cosmo quiz together, a lonely middle aged man & a lonely woman getting stuck on the top of a giant wheel & the suspense as they eventually find each other, the inner compatibility of a superficially incompatible young man & woman getting revealed as they go through a series of conversations at a speed dating event before they finally meet each other & so on. The play ended on a high note with an outstanding episode featuring Mandira Bedi & Darshan Jariwala as a couple wondering if each other's "hard coded" gender quirks meant that they are fundamentally incompatible & discovering along the way that life together gave many reasons to look past these quirks & perhaps even to celebrate them. This episode had some wonderful "laugh out loud" moments - I am adding "blackbelt in conversational judo" to my vocabulary right now. 

The interesting thing was how the issues & irritants the couples were dealing with seemed so familiar - I guess it really is true that all men are alike but it seems clear that so are all women ! We were left wanting for more when it ended - always a sign that the production worked.

All in all a Saturday evening well spent - I would happily recommend it to anyone that does get the chance to watch it. On a side note - I aim to take advantage of my newly liberated evenings & that may mean more such reviews so keep watching this space !

(More details at : Salt-&-Pepper-(English))