Comedy in Corruption

A scene from the play, Smart City.

I don’t understand anything besides comedy. I’ve tried my hand at serious dialogues, but the audience just ends up laughing anyway,” says 31-year-old theatre director Amitosh Nagpal. Probably to his audience’s relief, he’s given up trying anything mood-dampening. “The people I want to perform for — the aam aadmi — want to laugh. They want to forget their problems,” he says.

But Nagpal, also a film actor, script writer and lyricist, is not one for meaningless slapstick humour. His latest play, Smart City, is an adaptation of the 1842 Russian comedy by Nikolai Gogol, The Inspector General. When Nagpal first read Gogol’s play, similarities to his own birthplace and background came to mind. “People in Haryana are very comfortable with corruption,” he says, adding, “and in Punjabi songs, people boast about pulling out their guns and pumping bodies with bullets.” In Smart City, Hisar is a decaying city run by a corrupt mayor. Weak-charactered, greedy townsfolk chase money and status while trying to cover up their misdeeds from a government inspector.

But that’s not the only reason Nagpal chose Haryana to be the setting for the play. The dialogues also seemed to express themselves well in Haryanvi. “People there joke around and finish sentences with punchlines. It was well suited to the play,” he says.

There’s a tremendous power in comedy that Nagpal wants to exploit in his work. “Truth can be exposed through witty comments,” he says. Another reason Nagpal likes to work with comedy is because people aren’t able to hide their genuine reactions. “You like it and laugh or you don’t,” he says. Nagpal had previously translated Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night to Hindi. The resultant play, performed at the Globe Theatre in London, met with packed houses and was lauded by critics.

The play will be staged at Bal Gandharva Rang Mandir, Bandra West, on August 14, 7:30pm