In the fuzziness of drinking, you take a short flight of liberation from all the judgements that engulf you. It specially helps when you are dating. Love is more pulsatingly felt and emotions are uninhibitedly expressed when the spin of liquor hits your nerves. Amitosh Nagpal, the director of a new theatre show called Talli Tuesday, talks about what happens when you do just that—drink and date.
It’s a comic satire based on blind dating. The narrative of the play talks of a drink-n-date app called Talli
Tuesday that needs to be download before creating a profile on the page. You fill your preferences about the kind of person you’d like to date. Based on what you’ve keyed in, you’ll get notifications every Tuesday. If you like what you get, you set up a meeting with the person at a local club that has tied up with the app. Because of that, the drinks here are free. Therefore, all you got to do is drink and date and let will follow. “It’s an idea that came this one time when I was experimenting with love and alcohol. I wondered what would happen if I absorbed myself in these two most addictive things in the world. That’s how Talli Tuesday was born,” he says.
Nagpal has seen the wide gap between theatre and its audiences as deplorable. The medium has not reached Indians the way cinema and television has and that makes the director stony-faced as he says it aloud to us.
Besides good writers, the bastardisation of theatre forms has taken away the renown it once enjoyed. Part of the reason for this is that people have taken to films like no other performance form. Catchy songs, provocative dancers and slapstick dialogues are viewed as extremely gratifying.
For something that follows a comparatively slower pace—theatre, few have the attention span or intellectual discernment to sit through it. Added to this, the curse of not being able to gather enough revenue to pay the cast, further disillusions artistes about their calibre. “In this field, if your efforts don’t bare fruit tangibly, you’re not considered worthy of appreciation. Instead of applauding the effort, the parameters of success are gauged only by numbers,” says Nagpal.
But you strive to do better and greater things. You commit yourself to excellence and hope that there will be enough people to acknowledge that in the future. Like the director says, “We have not come this far, only to come this far.” January 14, at 4.30 pm and 7 pm, at Alliance Francaise, Lodhi Estate.
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