‘ was not Rajat Kapoor’s first, second or even third play with a red nosed cast but his fourth, and he’s definitely got a lot clown culture in his bag without the concept being overcooked. It was an alluring take on the Shakespeare’s comedy ‘As You Like It‘. The play was filled with constant tussle and even role reversal, igniting applause and laughter in perpetuum. The Shakespearean story, by the end of it, will start looking incredibly confusing and you would deem some parts to be quite illogical as part of the original edit. The Clown Corps was lead by the Striking Popo (Joy Fernandes), the play director, who would actually be consistently striking the mischievous rears of his actors. This play dissects each clown’s love life in the background of an economic and identity crisis. While the actors are playing their respective parts, all fiction-life internal jealousy and friction among the characters comes out in their rehearsals. Coco (Aadar Malik) and Mimi (Faezeh Jalali) are star crossed lovers who play the roles of Orlando and Rosalind, who in this play have met online. These characters bring out a funny twist of insecurities that affects their on stage performances and causes them to transition in and out of their roles and, say their usual dialogues in unusual ways. Fifi (Shruti Vyas) was the queen of ‘Friend-Zoning’ with Fido (Vinay Pathak) being the poor obsequious victim, fetching Fifi’s tea and painting her toenails. Their parallel characters Phoebe and Silvius of course correlate with their fiction-life positions and make them share the same one sided chemistry, mostly, being concocted in Silvius’s head. Soso (Cyrus Sahukar) is a classic example of a romance pessimist who plays the character of Melancholy Jacques. The only relationship he can seem to sustain is one where he can successfully predict the outcome to be in his favour, which is with his sock puppet Toto. Gigi (Rytasha Rathore) is the recently flown in ruffle-puff foreign edit of this hopeless lot who is either causing trouble among the actors or passing advances to Popo in order to land a significant role in his production. When the cauldron starts to boil over with all the tension, that’s when the abstract comes to life “To find yourself… you must become the other”. The men and women both puff up with confidence knowing that they understand the opposite sex to the tee. It’s a hysterical circle of events as the women play the men and the men play the women and all the stereotypes attached to each of them are thrown into the audience. The highlight of the play, however, has to be Toto’s frustrated, insightful monologue mocking the entire intent behind the production and the petty fall outs of the characters. It was as if Rajat Kapoor made room for the talent’s as well as the critic’s job. Baani Kashyap [email protected] Image Credits: http://www.mid-day.com/]]>
