Bluff-busters: Nonsensical farce is judged best by its gags
to recreate the Constituent Assembly, which convened from December 1946 to November 1949 and offers a televised version of the drafting process that most of us have read in history text books. Benegal had directed Bharat Ek Khoj (based on Nehru’s Discovery of India) and Yatra for Doordarshan earlier. The series has been written by Shama Zaidi and Atul Tiwari (who also plays Govind Ballabh Pant in the series), and will be aired on Rajya Sabha TV today onwards. The series has a host of well know actors and actresses clude Amit Behl as C. Rajagopalachari, Rahul Singh as Acharya Kriplani, Tom Alter as Maulana Azad, K.K. Raina as K.M. Munshi, Utkarsh Mazumdar as Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Rajeshwari Sachdev as Amrit Kaur, and Ila Arun as Hansa Mehta. Neeraj Kabi plays Mahatma Gandhi, who famously never entered the Indian Parliament. Dalip Tahil plays Jawaharlal Nehru and will be seen acting out the historic “Tryst with Destiny” speech that Nehru delivered on the eve of Independence.
In the 1968 Blake Edwards film The Party, veteran actor Hrundi V. Bakshi plays the bumbling film extra Peter Sellers who gets invited to a high-profile Hollywood party by mistake. At the party, where nobody wants to talk to this nobody, he amuses himself with, among other things, making friends with a parrot in a cage by feeding him from a box with Birdie Num Num written on it. He starts reciting this as he feeds the bird, wanders around mumbling “birdie num num” to himself. The scene ends with Sellers making bird calls on the speaker phone, to the puzzlement of a house full of celebrities.
It is unclear whether Madhav Mehta, founder-director of Epic Shit Entertainment, is trying to use Sellers’ antics as a reference point in his new play Birdie Num Num. What is absolutely clear, though, is that nonsensical farce makes for as much of a laugh riot today as it did back in 1968. Birdie Num Num is the second offering from the stables of this young theatre/ standup/improv company, and after the resounding success of Kasturba Panda ki Pantie, it has been playing to an audience harbouring high expectations. Barring the two gentlemen who walked out 10 minutes into the play on the night that this writer was present, presumably unable to bear the high degree of profanity, the audience seemed to be having a gala time, rocking Akshara theatre’s rickety wooden chairs to the point of breaking.
Described as a comedy-thriller, the play twists the mystery-thriller genre into a 100-minute long standing joke. Set in the hallowed offices of Ghoda Realtors’ south Delhi office, it revolves around four characters — Mr. Papan Pilo (veteran actor Maheep Singh), the rising star (or Drona, as they like to call him) of the real-estate world; his receptionist Lily Khosla (Mallika Dua), a tubby, curses-spewing woman with immense appetite for gossip, black forest pastries and chai; her colleague Anusha Ahuja (Kriti Vij), the pretty, though heartbroken assistant to Mr. Pilo who can’t forget her black hole of a boyfriend but is constantly on the lookout for love; and Shashwat ‘Sassy’ Verma (Shantanu Anam), the mysterious man from the head office who waits for Mr. Pilo for hours and tries to impress one and all with his faux-American accent.
When Mr. Bindal’s (the founder of Ghoda Realtors) son commits suicide by hanging himself by his shoe-laces for no apparent reason, the entire company is thrown asunder. Every member of the company must be thoroughly interrogated and Mr. Pilo is a prime suspect is this murky mystery. Yet, Mr. Pilo is barely on stage — his longest scene is when he is shown tied up and being beaten to pulp, where he gets philosophical about the hunter- hunted dichotomy and remembers his days shooting pigeons by chanting “birdie num num” as he threw bird feed at them.
Much like those pigeons and Mr. Pilo (at least in his head), the audience is part of an elaborate setup — this isn’t so much a story about ‘ what killed Bindal Jr.?’ as it is about ‘what goes down in offices?’. An adaptation of American playwright Adam Bock’s The Receptionist, counted among the most interesting plays of its kind, Birdie Num Num is almost entirely about Ms. Khosla, from the moment she tries to give sex-life advice till she saves the day by puncturing the villain’s plans to finish them all off. As you watch Dua play the typical Delhi belle with an awful accent, obsessed with collecting trays, imitating a horse when she’s standing in front of the office board with an agarbatti in her hand, you are convinced they couldn’t have picked a better actor for the role.
Turns out, the script was built with her in mind. “Two summers ago, my brother Nikhil came up to me and said, ‘I’ve found the perfect script for Mallika, the only problem is that the story is too vague and its ending needs some solid reworking.’ I started working on it in October, had the first draft ready by November and today, five drafts later, Birdie Num Num has become something I could never have imagined at the start,” says Mehta. “The play’s development has been highly collaborative in nature, from the set design to the music composition to the jokes, each member of the cast and crew has contributed to giving it its unique character,” he adds.
The uniqueness of the play actually lies in its ability to make you laugh in the most serious of moments. There is also excellent use of light, music and cinematic props — the slow-motion and the credits roll stand reinvented. Thrown into the fray is a pair of eunuchs and a messy story about infidelity that doesn’t really need to be there — but then, in this play where absurdism and parody come together, closure, catharsis or sense is not what you should be looking for.