Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone, in that sense, is a delight for the play/film-maker – a story of mass appeal told with a simple, flourish-free narrative.

Evam does a very decent job of the stage adaptation. This is one case where I enjoyed the play more than the book.

With a 2+ hour run time (long for a play, yet I didn’t feel it) Five Point Someone follows the plot of Chetan Bhagat’s novel faithfully, adding some of the distinct "Evamish" touches along the way.

Five Point Someone is about (as everyone must know by now) three friends Hari, Ryan and Alok,  underachievers or "five-point-someones" at IIT Delhi. The novel traces their lives through four years of IIT, with mostly Hari telling the tale in the first person. The play handles this device with two separate people as Haris – one doing the acting, the other outside as the narrator.

One of the most interesting aspects of the play was in its use of lights to create location and shift audience attention. Narrator Hari appears under a spotlight whenever his turn comes while the actors on stage freeze, then fades into darkness as the action resumes on stage. Red-and-blue rotating lights stand for the ambulance. An inventively designed bulb inside a bottle is part of their hostel room. The dark night on the terrace is lit up by a simulation of moonlight.

Special mention for the vertical bed, which brought on giggles and applause from the audience. Set changes must have been tough to manage within the few seconds that the main stage was dark and Narrator Hari was active. There was one awkward moment when the lights came on before the stage was ready; other than that it was done pretty adeptly.

I also liked the way the cast managed to face the audience at all times, especially in the unconventionally staged classroom scenes.

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It’s intriguing how actors excel in one type of role and are misfits in another. Ryan was fine as long as he played the self-assured hero, but did not pull off the guilt-ridden soliloquy that well. Prof Cherian was about okay as the strict disciplinarian, but in the difficult scene in which he reads Sameer’s letter and breaks down, he was very very good. Narrator Hari was just right for the role too, he has a voice to die for! But as always, taken collectively Evam’s acting left me underwhelmed. For a professional theatre group, there is too much rawness.

(Turns out that Evam has two casts for Five Point Someone. I saw the one on 28th Jan 2010. The Hari I didn’t get to see is getting lots of complimentary messages on Twitter, making me wish I had gone for his show!)

The play ended with a neat way of introducing the cast. For me, it is little gestures like these that makes Evam so much fun.

Watch the video: NDTV coverage of Urban Turban

The Hindu Metro Plus (Chennai) likes the play:

‘Urban Turban: Tall Tales from the top of our heads’, directed by Sunil Vishnu K., is a big step forward for Evam as a theatre group. In this production, based on relentless honesty, candid revelations and brave soul-baring by each actor, the team makes its strongest connect yet with the audience.

…but gently points out the flip side:

the production could certainly do with some cuts. Almost all the acts tend to meander, and actors tend to go on and on and on sometimes, flogging a dead joke.

Read the full piece here.

It appears from the Chennai review that Evam lived up to their claim of “new show each time” – a couple of gags quoted, and the section by  Rabhinder Kannan, were not there in the Kyra debut show.

Not too many personal writings about the play that I can locate. Madhumita has mixed views about the show – read her thoughts over at her blog.

If you absolutely couldn’t stand the play, you might find empathy with Nivedita’s comment#4 – here!

Karthik Kumar has failed the CAT, is in denial, and thinks he is Hercule Poirot; T.M. Karthik Srinivasan thinks he can act, thinks he can sing, thinks he can’t dance and thinks about what to do after quitting his job; Rabhinder Kannan is in his first job…

The outline of the show is pretty different from the one I saw at Kyra, Bangalore. The Hindu’s article confirms this: "No two shows are the same, they promise"!

Read the full piece here.

The description of Shannon’s new story ("Shannon McDonnell has four dogs, one cat and one husband") holds more promise than the one in their debut act, which I wasn’t so impressed with. In general, the new story snapshots are pretty attractive. Plus, there are more people involved in the Chennai act.

I’m beginning to think that with Evam, we’d be wiser to catch performances after they’ve gone on stage a few times. Their first few attempts seem to be like beta runs of a software. Not that I didn’t like the Kyra debut show. I enjoyed it hugely, but it felt under-prepared. The same happened with The Importance Of Being Earnest – the play improved after it was enacted a couple of times. Those who caught the opening shows had a fair share of complaints, which we didn’t.

If you watch Urban Turban at Chennai this weekend, do leave a comment to say how it worked for you.

The debut show at Kyra, Bangalore began with a  goofy short act by director Sunil Vishnu, after which Karthik Kumar took over with his ‘toilet woes’. He had a lot to say, tongue-firmly-in-cheek, about the horrific impact of modern public loo design on the fabric of society. Shannon McDonnell followed next, sharing experiences about settling into urban India from a westerner’s point of view. Another short act by Sunil, then back again to Karthik in the finale with the wackiest stories ranging from endangered species to ovens and baking [this mind you has nothing to do with cooking. To know more, you have to watch the show!]

Urban Turban works primarily because of Karthik Kumar. This is just his kind of thing (unlike Algernon in The Importance Of Being Earnest).  To keep an audience spellbound when talking of the intricacies of a crocodile’s jaw movements is no mean feat, but the man can do it.

That said, Karthik’s first act felt slightly raw. There was some mixing up of the lines, and a couple of jokes were repeated/stretched beyond the point of funny. A little pruning is needed over there. The closing act was superb, with a lot of jumping around over myriad topics yet all strung together extremely well.

Shannon has a great voice. As Lady Bracknell in The Importance Of Being Earnest, she was easily the best of the cast. In Urban Turban though, I felt that her portion was off the mood of the rest of the show. We were taking Karthik’s nonsensical chatter with smiles and a pinch of salt, but when the stage went to Shannon we suddenly didn’t know how to react. Her story was too real. Besides, those of us with friends from the US [yeah, I weaved that in, Evam please note ] who visit India have heard close versions of this story many times before. The cows and the traffic have the same impact on anyone from the West, they’re like clichéd motifs of the country. I wish Shannon had given those parts of her experiences a miss, and focussed only on the unexpected and the absurd.

Sunil Vishnu was good in the little time he showed up. A longer act from him will be most welcome.

This was my first visit to Kyra, so I’m not sure if they’re generally late but it wasn’t nice to be kept waiting for the play to start. The play was delayed far beyond the promised 2.30pm. Was this Evam’s dig at the Indian lax attitude towards time?

A bigger quibble is that the show did not contain all that its media coverage/promos led us to expect. For one, the Facebook page for the event mentions T M Karthik, Navin Balachandran and Rabhinder Kannan but they did not make an appearance on stage.

Evam’s blog suggests that the event is 90 minutes long, but it was surely nearer 60 minutes.

Also, the report on mybangalore says:

The Show at Kyra will stir up issues that we, as urban citizens, face in our daily life….To marry or to not marry? Arranged or love? Change the job or the city or the boss? To tweet or not to tweet? …

Other than a fleeting reference to arranged marriage, the other topics are not brought up at all. I wonder if the show is still a work-in-progress, and today’s performance an incomplete version of the real deal that the folks in Chennai are going to get next month?

But I’ll leave aside the nitpicks since I did have a great time. With excellent food at Kyra, friends for company and some nice laughs during the show, it was an afternoon well-spent.

I did come across many personal blogs that talk about this play. A few of them are linked from Evam’s blog, this page:

Evam’s Page On The Play

Naturally they’re all complimentary reviews

On another well-written piece about this play on the blog “eclectic reviews”, the writer Anshu Bora, far from impressed with the play, says:

When I was done watching Evam attempt Oscar Wilde’s Importance of being earnest, I was infuriated. yes, that is the word and no, I am not exaggerating. There was an evident paucity of quality, be it in the acting department, the set changes or even the dance choreography.

To be fair a few flaws such as slow set changes seem to have been fixed in the later shows. I agree fully with his disappointment with  the acting. Read the full post here.

On another blog, Gaurav Vaz who liked the play overall, makes this very perceptive comment:

…at many times during the play, I remember catching myself thinking, they are just saying those lines out like they are at rehearsal! or rather a line check! when you say something naughty or mischevious, there wasn’t at times, the expression that goes with it.

That apart, he has very nice things to say about “The Importance Of Being Earnest” and ends with a definite recommendation. Read the full post here.

Does the play live up to its hype? I wouldn’t say a firm yes. I enjoyed the play overall, but for that the credit must go to the script rather than Evam’s treatment of it.

Evam shines in the MTV-style of humour, but with British satire they were visibly out of their comfort zone.

Dialogue delivery appeared to be a problem. Other than the ladies who played Lady Bracknell and Miss Fairfax, the rest of the cast struggled with their lines. The role of Algernon, a key character in the play, is performed by Karthik Kumar, Evam’s star actor. Karthik generally has great stage presence and comic timing, but here he didn’t seem to get into Algernon’s character. He was simply playing himself on stage.

The best performance was easily Lady Bracknell’s, who got into the role with great ease and aplomb. Cecily was an embarrassment to watch, she was that bad. It was as if she was reading out memorized lines, that too in a barely audible voice.

The most curious decision was to introduce dances sequences into the play, something that’s not part of the original script. This may have made sense if the actors had dancing skills to show off (Brief Candle, for example, made good use of their cast’s singing talent), but here the dancing was quite shoddy. Why go out of the way to make your actors dance when they’re not cut out for it?

As with An Idiot For Dinner, I’ve probably liked the play less than most people. The audience reception in the theatre was very positive.  There was laughter and clapping throughout at Wilde’s witty lines.

When the play was over and the cast was welcomed on stage, guess who got the loudest applause? The butler!

“An Idiot for Dinner” was engaging and the fact that it was showcased as a movie earlier, does not take away from the fun quotient. The sets and props were well done.

Read the full piece here.

It’s a pity that none of the other mainstream newspapers/news websites  carry play reviews. They may have play announcements or post-event pictures, at most a small summary (which is clearly provided by people associated with the play – all papers carry the same ad-like write-up), but no considered opinion piece.