Shuffling through poetry of scattered relationships

Manav Kaul’s latest play ‘Tumhaare Baare Mein’ explores the dilemmas of romance in the dating app era. A review

Manav Kaul’s latest play ‘Tumhaare Baare Mein’, which was staged at Ranga Shankara recently, explores the disruptive complexities and caged insecurities that people go through in modern ‘dating’.

With a minimal setting of six chairs and six characters, three girls and three guys (played by Manasi Bhawalkar, Priyanka Choudhary, Sakhee Gokhale, Ghanshyam Lalsa, Kaustubh Harit and Hrishabh Kanti), the play begins with a choreographed sequence where one character wants to be a part of the dominant, socially accepted group sitting on a circle of chairs. The group points fingers in various directions and then eventually to a lone chair in front of the stage, nudging the odd one out of their circle robotically. As the play progresses, we seep into this comical yet tragic mess of understanding the morals of human relationships through the character’s journeys. The soundtrack by Sharad Joshi is groovy with rounded percussive elements and ticks that tingle the viewers into a routine hypnosis.

After the pandemic, people began yearning for more bonding in person. It is a hard game to play for some, with digital apps determining the blossoming of human relationships. Manav Kaul, with his simple dialogues and metaphors, manages to bring to light the plight of humans hunting for meaningful relationships while straying from their own moral compass in every decision they take. The search for air conditioned cafes, the nervous gaze of the male seeking the female he matched with on an app, the artificial persona each participant has to put on to be noticed, and the act of pleasing while lying your way through a conversation, all gets to us at some point.

There is too much to put up with, while at the same time it is something to laugh about since it’s the plight of us, humans, who have made this cage for ourselves. The entire play takes place in the interior of a city cafe that keeps transforming into a parallel landscape when every character has to speak their mind or become their vulnerable self. There is one character who is always sad, anxious and frustrated. He embodies all the experiences that a person has gone through while riding this vicious bandwagon of ‘artificially intelligent’ relationships, betrayal, remorse and realisation.

Another character in the play keeps talking about wanting to be a ‘chidiya’ (bird) and expresses that she would like to fly at some point in her life, to find her true calling. Underneath the plastic covered personalities lies a curious, intelligent being wanting to seek transcendence beyond the default settings of society. Some characters fall and some feign to fly confidently whilst losing their authentic selves in the race for recognition. Absorbing the effervescent emotions that bubble to the surface through these characters, the audience ponders with a question: ‘What is right or wrong anymore? Every decision makes sense.’

In a new form of reflective dialogue flow, when one character questions a character in front of him/her, another character in a different space replies to him/her. Through this interplay, we observe that there is no singular character in the play. The whole human conglomerate is a single organism coagulated with characters, breathing in its own rhythm. When the rhythm is disturbed, a purging follows where all other characters try to bring the rebel back to their own rhythm.

The narrative pace replicates the doom scrolling tendencies of the current digital generation by disrupting flowing scenes and sometimes being lost into a vortex of a single thought. The pace is analogous to an accordion expanding and contracting with an intuitive rhythm. In the middle of these unrestful scrolls, there are scenes that slow down and ponder on human actions and call the need for mindful dialogue within characters. The music embraces these contemplative scenes with melancholic strings and acoustic piano.

The set design makes clever use of a backlit white screen on the stage, where characters go and become moving shadows performing parallel actions. Pages strewn all over the floor on-stage are reminiscent of so much information at our feet. The ever-frustrated character, picking up a page, yells, ‘Why does everyone always write the truth in all this poetry? Tell me something good for god’s sake. Where’s my cold coffee?’ Each scene manoeuvres neatly between coffee, chaos, disruption, disintegration and realisation.

Manav Kaul manages to build a timeless narrative with a careful balance between experimental and traditional storytelling styles, while adding experiential wisdom and humour.

The next show is in Pune on August 12 and 13.