To bring alive a character on stage is hard enough, but to bring alive a sense of place far more. A film can be shot on location, here all you have is the stage. And so, Harlesden High Street sets itself up for a challenge – Harlesden, a modest area in London with a large immigrant population, has as big a role to play in this narrative as the people inhabiting it. The play traces a day in the lives of three Pakistani immigrants in Harlesden, each with their stories of finding themselves in this foreign land, and their personal struggles to obliterate that word  ‘foreign’.

The play isn’t so much about this day as any other, or even about these specific people than any other. Rehaan, Karim and Karim’s Ammi might as well be Rahim, Kabir and Kabir’s Ammi. Their stories are generic enough to be replaceable by equally interesting stories of another cross-section from the immigrant population. Harlesden High Street isn’t about what makes people unique, it’s about what makes different people the same.

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Do you know that feeling when you’re eating a dish with relish, in leisured bite sizes, when someone jogs your elbow and the last spoonful you were all set to savour drops to the floor?

Much of my Full Meals experience was like that. But let me begin at the beginning.

The deal is a series of six mini-plays, cushioned with short acts by a pair of actors in imaginative roles (dead superheroes to restaurant waiters to statues in a park!). The mini-plays stand by themselves without interlinks, only the actors get shared.

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String Theatre Marionettists, a London-based troupe, staged their puppet show, The Red Balloon, in Bangalore recently. The marionettist duo, Stan Middleton – a 3rd generation marionette, and Soledad Zarate, a marionette operator with Movingstage for the last four years, visited Bangalore as part of their All India tour. The show was organized by Yours Truly theatre of Bhagwaan Dhundoo and The Common Man fame.

Back home in London, these shows are generally staged in a tourist boat, with children seated at the center and adults at both ends of each row. Yours Truly theatre replicated this at ADA Rangamandira, the venue of the show, thus facilitating an unobstructed view to their primary audience. The seating arrangements were also made only on one half of the auditorium for the same purpose (see the seating plan below). They lost out on revenue because of this though . I also liked the way their volunteers mingled with kids before the show and made the tough job of convincing kids to move away from their parents (to ensure optimal usage of limited number of seats) look easy.

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Why is Fanny Price, the heroine of Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), aghast at the idea of a private play being enacted by her cousins in the absence of the head of the house? What is so shudder-worthy in their choice of play –  Lovers’ Vows – that she thinks of its dialogues as “so unfit to be expressed by any woman of modesty, that she could hardly suppose her cousins could be aware of what they were engaging in”?

Jane Austen’s readers unfamiliar with the play Lovers’ Vows find these questions exceedingly mystifying. A reading of this play along with Mansfield Park gives us some answers, and also telling insights into societal attitudes towards theatre in 19th century England.

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TP Kailasam, one of the legends of Kannada literature, is popular for his satirical comedies. His Kannada works include Ammavra Ganda (Henpecked Husband), Bandvaal Illad Badaayi (False Pride), Bahishkaara (Ostracism). He also wrote four English plays – The Burden, Purpose, Fulfillment, and The Brahmin’s Curse and few poems under the title, Little Lays and Plays. He is aptly known as Prahasana Pitamaha (Grandfather of Kannada Humorous Plays).

Rangatantra, a theatre group of IT professionals, staged one of his most popular comedy plays Bandvaal illad Badaayi. This is the story about how Ahoblu, a lawyer who boasts of non-existent success in his practice and eventually becomes a victim of his false pride.

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The National Youth Festival 2011, Udaipur, had an interstate one-act play competition as part of their events. Each state had 30 minutes to put forward their act, from which a jury would pick the winners.

The theme was left to the contesting troupes to choose. They came up with plays about the exploitation of the poor, widow remarriage, the plight of Kashmiris and other such noble thought-provoking causes. Sad soliloquies were delivered, impassioned tirades launched. No play was complete without copious shedding of tears.

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To all my readers – best wishes for a New Year full of peace, prosperity and playfulness.

A special thanks for my co-authors Anshu, Arvind and Sreekanth, and all the theatre folks who make watching plays and writing this blog such a pleasure.