Yasmina Reza's plays have always seemed a little too clever to me, their subjects peripheral, and more like set-ups for her characters and their relationships, with their manifold complexties and anxieties, waiting to be indulged. I am familiar with two of Reza's best-known works ART and THE GOD OF CARNAGE, both of which have had Indian productions in the original and in adaptation. Now the production company Red Earth Stories has produced Reza's THE UNEXPECTED MAN (1995) in an English translation by her old-time collaborator Christopher Hampton. Red Earth Stories has been recently found by Padma Damodaran and Sadiya Siddiqui, two strong actresses, who have a variety of plays to their credit.
Padma Damodaran acts in this two-person play along with Naved Aslam and she has also directed it. Given that the play for its best part alternates between the soliloquies of its two characters - a writer (played by Aslam) and his fan (Damodaran), it is the performances that need to be on top of the game. The set design is a stylised reflection of a train coach in which the play is set. It is tastefully done by Prasad Walavalkar; its skeletal wooden frame underscoring a minimalism that broadly permeates the make-believe of cultural context in which these two Indian performers find themselves European aboard a train from Paris to Frankfurt.
The intermittent pieces of select western classical music, part of the sound design by Achal Yadav, may appear a little tokenistic for the piano man that the writer doubles as, but nevertheless add to an atmosphere of philosophizing and internalization. Some of these pieces it appears are also part of the original instructions. No doubt this is music of the soul capable of churning the wide spectrum of emotions, leading us on to inner journeys, not always obvious. In theatre one must use these with great care because these are inherently powerful works of art. The light design by Deepa Dharmadhikari is mellow and works well in this setting.
With foreign productions, the negotiations are never easy, but in this production the dilemma is sought to be resolved by an earnest focus on the text, and indeed by way of the studied performances that find a more natural rhythm as the journey unfolds. Both Aslam and Damodaran at different times, sometimes fleetingly, sometimes deeply, resonate some of the more reflective lines with their underlying humour, cynicism, historical/political references, and the matter of fact truths that life invariably throws up, loneliness and age, being just two of those. But these moments are few.
Overall the play tends to be self-absorbing in ironic contradiction with the bitter writer Mr Parsky's attempt at self-negation and despair at the human race. The woman Martha across the seat from him and who is a great admirer of his work almost never fails to communicate her adulation for the writer who she thinks has cracked it all and with whose characters she finds ready identification in her close, departed friend and in her brother. Mr Parsky's seemingly arrogant way of looking at things is meant to be his shield and like many creative people he feels he is misunderstood, or worse not understood. If these strains are not familiar enough there is an undercurrent of sexism (whether deliberate or not) that almost presents a caricature of the famous male writer - that creative genius, but patriarchal no less with his disdainful, objectifying approach towards women. To that extent his woman admirer sadly assumes only a secondary part to this man's intellect, his "unexpectedness" - a marker of his less than apparent greatness; the title of the play unabashedly belongs to an eponymous book penned by him. The ending hinging on a possible romance between the writer and his admirer comes across all the more lame therefore.
Yet it is almost funny that in passing while alluding to Borges, that unique and sublime Argentinian writer, Mr Parsky should endear himself to us. Anybody who has read and known Borges deserves a more grateful ear. Even a second chance.
*Deepa Punjani has been writing on theatre and performance for close to two decades. She represents the Indian National Section of Theatre Critics, which is part of the International Association of Theatre Critics (IATC) that has over 50 participating countries.
