Heart of a City

We set up our company, Primetime Theatre, to promote Indian writing in English. I have directed a Karnad script before, Wedding Album (2008), which has completed 200 shows and is still running. I am also restless and wouldn’t like to draw a line through my body of work and discover a sameness in theme. 30 Days in September (2001) deals with child sexual abuse, while Zen Katha (2004) was about Zen Buddhism. My next is a musical about a thumri singer from the 1900s. In case of Boiled Beans on Toast, it documents the sociocultural aspects of present-day Bangalore.

What was your hook to enter the world of Boiled Beans on Toast?

I found no linear narrative, no beginning, middle and end. It is not a structured story with a normal theme of friendship or love and Girish brings his insightful and intelligent gaze into it. The characters bump into each other, talk, argue, reminisce, regret… There’s a guy who has come to the city and loves the traffic, the fumes of scooters, rickshaws and cycles. To him, all this spells progress. There’s an upper middle-class lady who complains that the flyovers are destroying the trees. Another lady is involved with an NGO and talks about her cancer hospice.

That sounds crowded.

There are sub-themes of rural aspirations, urban migration, environmental destruction and progress. These are not thrust forward. When a maid finds her upper-class employer crying because ‘another tree’ has been destroyed, she is flabbergasted. The audience may laugh along but, I hope, the underlying themes get absorbed.

How difficult was it to bring Karnad’s script on the stage?

The script had 21 characters, some with hardly two lines, so I edited it. We had nine actors playing this. In the script, all characters speak in English but it was sounding artificial if the maids said things like ‘How awful’. I wanted the dialogues of the maids to reflect their background — they come from Tamil Nadu or the borders of Karnataka — through their accent and how they speak with incorrect prepositions. This gives their characters a regional flavour.