Crazed by the City
In the play, Shernaz Patel and Rajit Kapur play a Parsi-Punjabi couple.
Express Features Service
The story of a man grappling with city life — right from the noisy neighbours to continuos drilling of roads by the Bombay Municipal Corporation (BMC) — will be captured in Rage’s upcoming play, The Siddhus of Upper Juhu.
Directed by Rahul da Cunha, the play gives a satirical glimpse of how city life can take a toll on one’s mental health, driving him to the brink of a nervous breakdown.
A middle-aged couple, Bubbles and Behroze Siddhu, played by Rajit Kapur and Shernaz Patel, live in a high-rise building in Upper Juhu and are stuck in the endless rut of growing civic issues and countless problems with their neighbours. It gets worse when Bubble’s apartment is burgled and the robbers take not only all his clothes, but also his precious bottle of Black Label.
“The Siddhus of Upper Juhu is a devised play that came to me many nights ago when I returned home around 11 pm to find a bulldozer waiting outside my building. It looked eerily like the BMC had come to demolish the place. The drilling began around 2 am and went on through the night. After some poking around, I found out that this work would go on for 15 months. Also, they had dug up the wrong road,” recounts da Cunha.
Like many of da Cunha’s plays, Mumbai, the city that many love to hate, is an important character in the production.
“If you’re not strong-willed, Bombay is unliveable. Yet we live here because there’s something about it that we still hold on to,” adds the director and adman. To be staged on March 14 and 15 at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, the play is part of Aadyam, a theatre initiative that is bringing five new plays to Mumbai and Delhi.
mumbai.newsline@expressindia.com
Source:: Indian Express
