Bella Jaisinghani

Quasar Thakore Padamsee probably figures among the youngest directors on Mumbai’s theatre scene. Just in his early 20s and head of Q Theatre Productions for the last three years, Quasar has adapted two English plays with which Mumbai might identify.

Q Theatre staged The Urban Burden, a set of two one-act plays, last week in Mumbai. The inaugural performances of Lunch Girls and The Lucky Ones were also held at the NCPA’s Experimental Theatre. A six-week schedule of performances is in the offing.

Both presentations highlight life in a metropolis, and focus on the fallout of working long, fixed hours. The stresses and strains of city life and a lack of time and opportunity are factors common to both plots.

The director chanced upon these plays on his bookshelf at home. “My mother had picked them up when she was in England,” he says. “I read them just for a lark, but soon realised that they were screaming out for adaptation.” The plays were originally set in England, and Quasar has “kept faithful to the spirit of the plays, despite trimming some strong English references”.

He gives a brief outline of the plots. “Lunch Girls brings up a problem that is so typical of present-day Mumbai. Four young women want to meet up for lunch, but never manage to do it because something or the other keeps coming up. In fact, in none of the scenes do all the friends even appear together. Their interaction is shown through the telephone conversations they have with one another,” he says.

The other play, The Lucky Ones, is set in an office basement. “It features four colleagues who talk about the problems they face at the workplace,” explains the director. “For most people in the city, life is all about landing a job or getting promoted. But their spirit crashes when they have to take everything in the line of duty, even suffer injustice. One of the characters in this play is idealistic, another is ambitious and has learnt the ropes, while the fresher has stars in his eyes because he is so new to the workplace.”

The Urban Burden does not offer a solution to any of these problems, Quasar says, simply because there is no conceivable answer. He agrees with Ron Hart and Tony Merchant, who wrote Lunch Girls and The Lucky Ones in a different time and place.