Kalki Koechlin marked her directorial debut with The Living Room , an ironically named play about Death and his friends. Opening at Ranga Shankara with a fully sold out five show run, the play takes the audience on a journey between life and death; and the space in between. Over 90 minutes, the stellar cast pries open unheard memories and thoughts, taking you on a journey within each character.
Death visits Ana Nil to transition her to the next stage, but gets side-tracked by ginger cookies and tea. Along the way her nephew Born visits, emotions are laid bare and finally, a doctor called for. For what seems to be a run-of-the-mill comedy/drama, Koechlin does manage to infuse something of a sting in the tale. There’s only one way for a play like this to end, but the journey from the climax to the resolution was as interesting as could be.
Hats off to Koechlin for making her directorial debut with a piece of original writing. English theatre in India is suffering from translations and adaptations that have far outlived their relevance. Some of the dialogue is genuinely funny, no easy task given the subject matter. At one point,
Death is appropriately referred to as a ‘cross dressing vampire’. Koechlin and Neil Bhoopalam even reference their other production together, Hamlet – The Clown Prince , by having Death mouth a version of that famous line – ‘To decide or not to decide, that is the question’.
But the production comes with its own albatrosses. The setting is unclear – death is an amalgamation of Greek and Indian mythology, at least, by his own multiple self-proclamations. In fact, death himself is problematic – Koechlin resorts to ‘traditional’ blackface, rather blueface, to personify death with the female protagonist in all-white. The colour profiling seems intentional but purposeless — something that could have been avoided. At one and a half hours, the play could have done with some heavy editing to stitch its storyline together . However, watch the play for Bhoopalam, who is in prime form as death. Alternately assertive and docile, humorous and humourless, he displays existential angst in tandem with a child-like willingness to play along. After an intense monologue which has him demonstrating the power of his book to Ana, violently throwing chair, table and pillow at one another, he apologises for getting ‘carried away’.
And Koechlin as a director is interesting – her subject matter is offbeat, her casting on spot. Little Productions’ The Living Room ultimately occupies the same nether region that its matter does – neither a comedy nor a drama; something, but not everything that it could be.
