Written by Falk Richter and directed by probably one of the youngest NSD alumni, Amitesh Grover, ELECTRONIC CITY was performed on 7th January 2008 at the Mini Theatre of the P.L. Deshpande auditorium as part of the satellite NSD festival in Mumbai. The play enfolds against the backdrop of mega metros, where human life or human existence is under the total control of mechanization.
The two protagonists- Tom and Joy are symbolic of the rich, ambitious and the successful types in society who are constantly flying and attending meetings. They have lost their roots with the earth that has nurtured them. They are firmly convinced about the righteousness of their movements in space and time but hardly realize that they are just stuck in the grooves of an irreversible routine. The world around them is moving with dizzying speed and their existence is like a machine that earns money and success but without the sense of human enjoyment.
The play depicts the chaotic alienation and enstrangement beneath the mechanisations and which constantly bombard the camouflaged sense of security and of well-being as generated by laptops and email accounts, iPods and privilege cards, porno booths, roving cameras, VIP lounges and connecting flights. It envisions a futuristic, successful elitist culture, in which the achievers are lacking all humane qualities and the identity which makes them unique. This is a warning signal to a modern generation that measures success in money alone.
The use of multimedia in this production becomes an integral part of the script and the theme. The background projections covering the actors’ body in front of the huge screens are representative of the modern man embroiled in the maze of technology. The weird music in the background, the rapidly moving visuals in the corridors of affluence and the pornographic projections enhance the sense of void that is engulfing the generations to come. In a particular scene, Joy with the aid of techniques like the camera and the TV screen dresses and undresses even as Tom tries to connect with her sexually from another space. The image is not funny but frightful!
The team of artists worked in perfect synchronization with each other as well as with the concomitant effects and techniques. The set was neat and clean and the performance space was used very well. The costume design by Suhasini Taneja was appropriate and the colour black for the chorus was suitable. Amitesh Grover has treated the play as a farce from the ‘inner mental world of contemporary man in stylized manner with wordless physical language and modern music or sounds to describe the victims of globalization. The performance invokes aptly the histrionics of urban living.’ His video work succeeds in adding more dimensions to the play.
Amit Saxena as Tom and Padma Damodaran as Joy are a joy to watch- the grace, the ease, the mechanical monotone quality in dialogue delivery and the uninhibited enactment of copulation shows the maturity of both the artistes. The play was produced in collaboration with Max Muelleur Bhavan, New Delhi.
*The writer is a senior theatre and television person who has trained under Ebrahim Alkazi at the National School of Drama (NSD). She has written for publications such as ‘The Asian Age’ and is a regular contributor to the Prithvi Theatre Newsletter (PT Notes). She also offers theatre training to students at the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan and is an important critical voice for the Gujarati Theatre.
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