Comedies, dramas explore consumerism, gender and women’s emancipation

Darling Darling is a comedy presented by Navras Theatre Group, and directed by Chittaranjan Tripathy. It's a play about Prabhakar, a man with a roving eye who has several women friends and his wife, who is a very down to earth woman. His old friend Bhaloo, is his loyal wingman. One day, two of Prabhakar's current mistresses come to his house thinking that his wife is away. And thereby begins all the fun!

Will Prabhakar be caught Will he repent or will he get away with it all The play was very loud with everybody shouting their dialogues but in the melee, Kimti Anand, playing a vet, stood out. The other person who impressed was Ganesh Seth as the hawaldar and Ashok Dhawan as Jagdev Rao, the prying neighbour.

Ganesh Seth is the man who is behind this company and is the founding member of Momosa, the Modernite's Old Students group. Momosa relies a great deal on Ganesh, who is the prime mover of the theatre company, under which they stage plays annually.

As an actor he has done several roles in his career, from leading man to small roles like the hawaldar and has been conscientious to every part that he has ever played.

Adha Chand, was presented by the National School of Drama Repertory Company at their Abhimanch auditorium. The play is written and directed by Tripurari Sharma who said in her notes in the brochure that the play is a collaborative work with the repertory artists.

The play is set in a call centre, where men and women are working together. All of them are given Western names like Randolph Hayward or Sabrina Lotts. They all rely on their voices and convincing ability when they deal with the clients from America and other places in the West. They are supposed to convince the clients of the invaluable contribution their product is making in the lives of the general public. So it is basically a consumerist society that the call centres are promoting.

The differences between their lives at home and the office is too drastic for words. At home they might be living in a cramped one-bedroom flat with their parents and siblings, but here in the call centre, their voices are very important to the business and they are treated like lords and ladies. The voice belongs to a person who is pretending to be somebody else when suddenly a trick voice change by the client gets to the employee and then it is impossible for the call centre employee to carry on his/her conversation with the same client.

This happens in two cases in the play. One where a woman employee leaves the office and the second when a very ambitious woman is forced to resign because of the hullabaloo she causes in the office when selling some shares to an American.

In the first case, the woman leaves the office because she cannot live with this everyday deception. The character's name is Malti in real life and is called Margaret at work. During the course of work, Malti happens to talk to a man on the verge of committing suicide. But he lives in the U.S. and so she can't do anything from Mumbai and she is heart-broken. The role was played by Aparijita Dey.

Sampa Mandal played the other woman's role, Rama and she is called Rita Thurman by the office.

In the second case, Sampa Mandal played the other woman's character, Rama. Rama is called Rita Thurman at work.

While Rama is selling shares to an American, he tells her only that her voice is very meaningful, but the woman is completely taken by him. Rama thinks she can do a variety of things with her voice and imagines herself going to America and astounding the client with her melodious voice. In the meanwhile, the man in the office she has been dating, gets jealous and he tries to bring her back to reality. But Rama's imagination has taken her too far and she won't listen to him or her other colleagues. Sampa Mandal was good in her role as Rama.

The play is basically an attempt to answer to the space in the call centre which metaphorises the real and the virtual. It is a place that is trapped by market forces and meshed by the knots of gender, power and control. When so much changes, can a person remain true with her/his core

The title of the play is taken from the fact that most of the incidents take place after the half moon is in the sky and drooled over by lovers.

Yatrik presented Noor Jehan — An Empress Reveals', written and directed by Avijit Dutt.

The play opens with Noor Jehan as Mehrunissa in her marriage to emperor Jahangir, in which she is young and full of passion. The mature Noor Jehan is played by Vaani Vyas, who is in jail, and both take part in the play and tell the story of a woman who excelled as a poetess, designer, architect and empress and defined women's emancipation long before it became a term the world knew.

Proceeding in short scenes, the play is tilted in Noor Jehan's favour. We do not get to know even a little about her greyer side.

The costume design and fabrication by Kriti Sharma was excellent as were the head gears by Vikas Kumar Gupta. The lights were also decent by Murli Basa. Oroon Das, the designer of the play who played Jahangir, tried very hard to bring the regality and the stature of a Mughal emperor in his stance but he could not quite manage it. Vidhushi Mehra as Mehrunissa was too simplistic and coy in her behaviour to be a Noor Jehan. The mature Noor Jehan was quite good in her controlled movements and speech.