HYDERABAD: As part of its ‘Theatre weekend’, Qadir Ali Baig Theatre Foundation invited Hoshruba Repertory from Mumbai to perform Chinese Coffee in the city. This is an Indian adaptation of a popular Broadway play written by American playwright Ira Lewis in 1992.
This tale of dark comedy is about two struggling artists Yakub Ansari and Harry in their middle ages, played by Danish Hussain, the director of the play and Vrajesh Hirjee respectively. Yakub is a failed writer turned photographer and Harry is a struggling novelist, who lost his job as a doorman and desperately needs money. Harry lands at his friend Yakub’s home to collect the money that he borrowed from him. The story is set in Delhi on one cold evening of February. The whole plot unfolds over their conversation on that evening and eventually ends with the rupture in their decades of friendship.
The 90 minutes play in English was an emotional roller coaster ride for the audience with humour acting as a mild factor in delivering serious drama. With hysterical and heartwarming moments in the play, the audience were spellbound throughout with a series of awes and sighs. They enjoyed the well-crafted script woven with humour, despair, and malice in friendship. There were instances of roaring laughter in the room but there were times when absolute silence prevailed. The richness of the script dotted with intricacies of the human emotions connected with the audience, who could easily relate themselves to these two middle-aged characters.
Yakub’s random lines of Urdu in between and Harry’s mimicking in Punjabi worked out well. Both actors succeeded in pulling out moments of high drama with intense dialogue delivery in between. One person from the audience, Madhav, while congratulating the director said, “It was the intensity of the language in the play that I liked the most, it was so emotional.” While talking about instances of emotional rage in the play, Danish Hussain said, “When you are speaking, the focus should not be on the language but should be on the emotion, then the audience will involve with the characters. Human frailty is the most important thing in this play. Stories can make people more sensitive, more human.”
Even though it was an adaptation, director Danish Hussain gave some local touch to the play. “The subject is universal and there are minor adaptation changes like references. In this literary marvel, Ira Lewis was able to bring such a gamut of human relations and emotions. This 90-minutes conversation is delivered as a story organically to the audience,” said the Mumbai-based actor-director.