HYDERABAD: The soul of a story peeps in the beginning of a plot and the good tales keep the narrative lucid, flowing even when tumultuous twists and turns come immersing the audience with the growth of its characters. And this is where the success of a story or a play lies.
That’s how Salvaton mein Samvaad, a Hindi play written by Mani Madhukar reaches dark recesses of its character’s psyche that leads to the audience almost standing close to the characters so much so that they can touch their mental narratives.
Performed recently at Lamakaan, the play, a production of Kissago Theatre and Film Production Group, floored audience with its deep-set dialogues that opened a box of dark secrets.
The play opens with only two characters that meet in a park, another important character Nita remains in absentia. The characters appears paradoxical both in age and appearance. One is Nita’s father, a middle-aged man while another is Nita’s room-mate and friend a young girl with a devil-may-care-attitude and a vicious motor-mouth. Though strangers, they talk casually to each other. But soon, her conversation reveals the not-so-virtuous life both the friends are living. And this is not it, her words turn everything topsy-turvy in the life of Nita’s father.
Her fuming sentences take the mask off his face of being a just and moral man as she tells how he mentally tortured his wife making her life hell.
His wife’s torture doesn’t end here, she’s pushed into a forced relationship with her own father-in-law adored by Nita’s father.
More than this revelation what shocks the man more is when she discloses that Nita is not his daughter but his father’s. While he remained blinded with his own suspicions and fake morality his daughter found a new life in drugs and a man to love. The dialogue delivery by Jay Jha and Shailja Chaturvedi were brilliant especially when she talks about the drug she carries in her pocket. She articulately says how this life is incomplete and it’s the drug which completes everything.