Play Review — A Walk in the Woods

Venue: St. Andrew’s Auditorium, Bandra West, Mumbai

I’m going to start with the conclusion. This is the best play I have ever watched. Period.

This is originally an American play by one Mr. Lee Blessing, inspired from real life events involving Mr. Paul Nitze (USA) and Mr. Yuli Kvitsinsky (USSR) — two diplomats — turned — negotiators who are trying to find a way to limit arms proliferation in the world at the height of the Cold War. That they went beyond their brief and still couldn’t achieve success is exactly the kind of stuff that good theater is made up of.

This play has been adapted for the Indian context by the brilliant Motley Theater Group run by Indian acting stalwarts, Naseeruddin Shah and Ratna Pathak Shah. The featured countries become India and Pakistan who seem to have been in a state of perennial war since the two nations birthed; only the temperature of the war has gone up and down as per the complex machinations of vote bank politics.

Naseeruddin Shah plays Jamaluddin Lutfullah, a man who can be termed as a fixer in the interminable chaos that is Pakistan. But calling him that would be downplaying his charm, wit and diplomatic skills to a great extent. He is definitely sartorially inclined and knows how to weave a web of words without even breaking into a sweat. But rather than all this, what defines him the best is his heart of gold and his ultimate wish to have a good time while making good friends on the way.

Rajit Kapoor plays Ram Chinappa, a textbook specimen of a typical sincere Madrasi good boy. He does everything with a fixed end outcome in mind and seems to take things a little too seriously for his own good. He is sartorially inclined but in an old fashioned, prim and proper way. He has a heart of gold too, make no mistake about that but there seems to be an endless battle going on between the head and the heart about what’s right and what isn’t.

The play is about when the twain meet — as different as can be on the outside but having something particularly special in common on the inside. Both of them care deeply about the quintessential common man without any distinction between which side of the border he was left on once the brutalities of the Partition ended. But they are also fiercely patriotic in their own under / over stated ways.

I’d hate to give away any spoilers but a couple of brilliant points made by the two lead actors have stayed with me since I watched the play a few days back. One of them is when Naseer tells Rajit that the reason why these agreements thrashed out by negotiators while sitting in the peaceful climes of Switzerland never work is because they are discussed, debated, and agreed upon in conditions which are alien to the two countries. Can our external atmosphere have so much impact on the way we think? Wonderful question to think about.

For me, the biggest takeaway from the play was how the veteran Jamaluddin mentors the greenhorn Chinappa as the latter tries to find his way through the labyrinths that accompany such assignments. Jamaluddin has grown into a typical subcontinent cynic over the years after watching innumerable attempts for peace being shred to pieces by the self — interested powers that be. But Chinappa, to his credit, absorbs from the older gent’s wisdom what he should and never lets his country or its interests down in the process. Perhaps his biggest achievement is that he is able to use his bloody-mindedness tinged with generous helpings of hope to get Jamaluddin to push for important developments on the other side of the border.

Needless to say, the hero in a Motley play is the strong script. To the credit of the original American play and the Indian adaptation, it isn’t a coincidence that one tends to identify more with and thus, root more for the Russian / Pakistani character. Probably, there is an important lesson hidden in there somewhere. The set is a simple one, as spartan as the woods are. There are a couple of beautiful Sindhi poems that are sung by Rekha Bharadwaj at the start of the play and right after the interval ends. I didn’t understand the meaning but her special voice seems to add to the feeling of helplessness felt by the common man all the time, in face of the ever changing geopolitical landscape that he hardly understands. The costumes and the stage lighting capture beautifully the changes in weather and by analogy, the cyclic nature of the relationship between the two countries — frosty to warm to lukewarm to breezy. The two lead actors are institutions in themselves and the chemistry between them makes it a treat. In a way, this play poses questions about human interactions too — do opposites attract? Does familiarity breed contempt? What does being friends with someone mean?

If you’re not looking to leave your mind at home for one of those idiotic films and if you’re up for something that stays with you after it’s over, do go for this one.