The UK-based performing arts company Bandbazi has been touring India this November with their play Mind Walking, a cross between theatre and aerial acrobatics.

Philippa Vafadari, the creative director of Bandbazi who also plays the role of Rosa in Mind Walking, talks to us about the making of the play.

Shuchi: What prompted the choice of subject – an old man losing his mind, in an alien land?

Philippa: I am half Iranian and met an old Iranian man in a dementia care home who had forgotten his English and only spoke Farsi. I speak ok Farsi and when I spoke to him he wept. Where was he? Iran aged 10? Who knows. He was in an English home with nothing familiar around him. My mother and my siblings don’t speak Farsi. What would happen to our family if my dad lost his English?

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It is often that I find myself saying: "The concept was great, if only the execution lived up to it." Mind Walking was a change – it made me say the exact opposite.

The story of an old man whose degenerating brain keeps wandering into a pretty predictable past, doesn’t make for the most exciting plot. What holds the play together is some top-notch acting – and the very interesting use of a hoop.

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The promos of the play The Tale Of Haruk had me intrigued: the language, they said, was "Korean with English subtitles".

Subtitles in a play? This was a new one.

They managed it with large screens along the sides of the stage to display English translations of the actors’ dialogues. With that aid, the audience in Bangalore could follow the Korean play without hiccups.

When I hear my friends rave about Neenaanaadrenaaneenena? or Mysooru Mallige, I wish for a bridge across the language gap – and my mind harks back to The Tale of Haruk.

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As you’d know, the phrase "stealing your thunder" is used when someone else appropriates your ideas for their own benefit, undermining your credit.

The phrase interestingly has its roots in theatre.

The story is that seventeenth century British dramatist John Dennis used a new method of creating the sound of thunder for his production Appius and Virginia (1709). It isn’t clear from the texts available today what this method was, some sources say it was rattling a tin sheet on the backstage, others say it was rolling metal balls in bowls of wood.

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There is a whole lot of good writing about The Blue Mug online. Linking to the articles I enjoyed most.

Unboxed Writers has an amazingly detailed review.

Have you noticed, how for every point, life offers a counterpoint? As if to remind you that for every ‘this,’ there is a ‘that?’  And for every Delhi Belly, there is The Blue Mug?

Read the full review – Memory is a Blue Mug.

I was sore about being quoted out of context in this Indian Express article, but my complaint seems trivial after reading Bijoy Venugopal’s experience with a "hack" from Mid-Day.

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Our lives are shaped by memories. Incidents from years ago that struck so deep their vibrations still live within us, that have made us into the people we are today. The Blue Mug is a recounting of such memories, by a formidable line-up of actors – Vinay Pathak, Rajat Kapoor, Munish Bhardwaj, Sheeba Chaddha. In a fluid criss-cross, the actors take turns to narrate vignettes from their lives. The stories are as varied as the people telling them – sleeping on the terrace on summer nights, deaths of loved ones, visits of big-city kids to their ancestral home in a small town, circus jokers that strike you with terror.

In between real-life narratives of the cast comes a slice of fiction: the tale of Joginder (Ranvir Shorey), a Sikh man whose brain is stuck in a time warp – he can remember nothing of his life beyond 1983.

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It is probably significant that Boy With A Suitcase skips "The" from its title, shifting focus from "the boy" Naz, 12-year old war refugee, to the concept of a personal journey towards maturity, with a small load of possessions, both material and psychological.

A joint production of Ranga Shankara and Schnawwl-National Theatre of Germany (called Do I know U?), Boy With A Suitcase is a bildungsroman that follows Naz as he is sent off on a bus by his parents towards the land of "milk and honey". What follows is the kind of arduous adventure Naz’s hero Sindbad could proudly put on his resume: gunfire, wild animal chase, sweatshop, escape, dangerous crossing of water, crawling reach to the destination, disillusionment and eventual acceptance. The lines between fact and fable are fuzzy – we are never quite sure which era or which city we are looking at. And that’s all right – the point is not the place and time but the indomitable spirit of survival.

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