Alyque, have you lost it??!!?

Alyque Padamsee and his theatrical troupe landed in Dubai with ‘Unspoken Dialogues’. I jumped at the chance to encounter the histrionics of the legendary ad guru & actor…hoping his flamboyance was intact (keeping in mind the fact that he’s older than the nearest antiquity).

The play came with generous helpings of his family….wife Sharon (ex-Madonna-impersonator-current-botox endorser), daughter Shazahn (young, beautiful…and that’s where the achievements end).

With a name like ‘Unspoken Dialogues’, the play held many a promise claiming that “it reveals the hidden secrets of the heart that are always left unsaid”.

Made me think “Ah! So much like my life, where things are always hanging unsaid”. That said, I waxed and waned and conned a friend, Van (who’s mildly suspicious of anything to do with advertising people…can’t say I blame her!) by buying the most expensive, best seats in the house. And the promise of a substantial dinner. In my delirium, I do admit I bled through my nose a little, but figured an evening of pure theatre would purge me of my feeling of guilt.

I was wrong…so, so wrong.

The play began with Sharon’s ‘unspoken dialogue’…which ironically was a monologue of a woman so besotted by a man, that to have him by her side forever, she murders him and keeps his body in the basement. In short, the story of a maniac. I could still live with that and admit to having taken a certain amount of pleasure in a woman murdering a man (Aw c’mon…I was kidding!!). Despite Sharon’s foot-stomping, immature portrayal, her dialogue delivery was flawless. I waited.

The next set saw Alyque himself (and this is where I brightened up a little) take on the guise of a doctor (quack?!?) giving advise to his patient. Nothing could save that dialogue…not Alyque’s Wodehouse-like delivery, his strange conviction in the horrid piece he had written…nothing. I couldn’t believe that I was watching a play with the kind of script we rustled up for school plays!!

Case in point. Remember those snickers passed from girl to girl when anybody mentioned ‘laptop’ in the days laptop first came into the limelight?? A dialogue between a boss (Alyque) and his secretary (some girl I don’t know from Eve) had the boss saying “What??!!? You want a laptop? Do you want to sit on top of my lap??”

Sigh.

I still gritted my teeth and sought deliverance…especially since my theatre-uncouth friend got increasingly restless and started biting into an apple (an act which normally would have made me gaze in anger at her having defiled a play…but this, I had to concede). Between the scrunches of an apple, I heard the rest of the incredulously-childish play.

The next, we saw the quintessential generation gap fight between father and daughter. And the lame way it was handled. Nothing different from what we have seen in countless, mindless movies…the only exception being Shazahn, holding a Barbie doll, teetering edgily between adolescence and childhood.

Just when I was nursing the burnt hole in my pocket, which by now had seared the inside of my thighs…and just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, it did. With a talking dog (a man dressed in gloves for paws and strangely rouged red on the apples of his cheeks…as if dogs had rosy cheeks). He panted and spoke about how his master treats him. Just when Van threatened to get up in her seat and do an item number, I decided to leave.

Just then, the next dialogue’s theme was announced…’what women want’. A-ha! I thought…now we are getting somewhere!

Two women…Sharon & that other girl. Sharon, shrill and whining because she just left her husband. The other girl, her friend….trying to put up with her and coaxing her to drink away her sorrows.

Sharon’s tone got shriller, sillier and I got going…in the company of a friend with a murderous expression on her face.

I said “Maybe they’ve dumbed it down for the Dubai audience”
She asked “Whatever for?? Considering 3/4th of the audience was Indian!”

All I could mutter was “Maybe Alyque’s lost it…he’s quite old, you know”

And she “Then he should just retire…gracefully, no?”

After this, I had to agree.