Cockadoos Coc kadoos Cockadoos! Bobby Watson, son of late Bobby Watson, nephew of the Bobby Watson who had a cousin named Bobby Watson, sold an ox today to have an egg tomorrow. From sage to stooge. From stage to surge. Such caca!
Eugene Lonesco’s play, The Bald Soprano, is this weird roller coaster ride which takes absurd to another level of abstraction and then dares you to draw an interpretation of it. The closest you can compare the dialogues of the play is to the current pandemonium we see in our politician’s statements, the only difference being, if you want you can make some sense of the play. Directed by Krishna of Aham Theatre, the play greets the audience with this set which warns you upfront that your logic will be turned on its head, with its upside down chairs hanging from the ceiling.
And just as you process this, Sohail set the mood with some live percussion on a set of Congas. The Smiths, played by Shishir and Abhinanda, walk in to the beats of the Congas and make no effort to establish that they are in England with their English tea and English soup and English chairs and English socks. This is where the audience participation starts as all the dialogues are rants without any sense. The audience makes of it what it feels like. The Smiths are followed by their maid Mary played by Shailaja, and then by the Martins played by Avinash and Anmola. For some reason there was also a fire chief played by Ahmed.
You can either take the play at face value, in which case it is a slapstick on steroids; or, you can dig deeper. It may be about stages of marriage which goes from love to boring to forgetting who your spouse is. The play personifies to each his own. To pull off such random characters the actors have to be one solid team on stage and they were. They stayed in character even off stage when no one could see them, and helped each other in midst of the mayhem when somebody forgot their cues.
There are two take-aways from this play that you go home with. One stay away from whatever the playwright was on while he wrote the play; and two, under no circumstances stay away from the next show of this play.
