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Synopsis

A surreal nightmare: a world at war, a society losing its moral bearings and succumbing to greed and violence, love between men and women irrevocably fraught by power. People cannot escape, people cannot find the address to their own homes. Children recruited to man the borders and the very old are stuck waiting until they forget the past. Art keeps disappearing from the walls of museums and galleries and on television, men must only perform as men ‘ought to’. This is the backdrop against which the play takes place: Tara, a working-class woman works as a Love Coach instructing Arvind, an upper-middle-class man, on how to fall in love- 'like in the movies'. A child soldier is recruited to test the historical knowledge of an elderly couple before he sanctions their re-entry into the land. Two actors one named Father and another named Son perform in television sketches wrought with violence and hyper-masculinity but a 'Humour Bill' is threatening the survival of the show. An abstract artist panics when he gets commissioned to make a stately portrait of the nation's top leader to be unveiled at a grand national celebration. All their stories are entwined with this much-anticipated event. But what happens when Tara learns what love really is while coaching Arvind, or the soldier who ultimately is a child falls asleep listening to the old couple's tales as if they were his grandparents? What if the actors who are so aggressive with each other on-screen are actually two men deeply in love with each other off-screen? And what if the timid state-funded artist decides to unveil the truth through his portrait instead? It is a dystopian vision of a world turned against itself, except, there are people, real people, negotiating their circumstances as human beings do - with humour, kindness and even an unlikely courage when the need arises.

Duration

70   Minutes

No of characters

9