Synopsis
Garbo is about the class of ‘young people’ living aimlessly with frustration of shattered dreams, the diffusion of mediocrity, and the burden of inhibitions. A play about the generation which breaks out into defiance of living out their own lives with non-conformism for a credo; throwing up in the process a small minority culture, containing within itself its own seeds of destruction.
As the play engages in the inner battles of these people, sexuality becomes the major concern. Where Intuc plays a frustrated intellectual professor who seeks comfort in playing with words, Pansy plays a potential homosexual an art school dropout, who is continuously pursued by an impotent Shrimant and Garbo, the mother-mistress of the three males who is a petty actress in B grade movies, fast losing her glamour, and a larger than life sex goddess for the three men cooped up in their ‘sitting room’. The plot is about how each character searches for the escape route — how in the first half, the three men bare their sexual urges in relation to Garbo; how later they are afraid to face the reality that Garbo is pregnant; how even in her pregnancy they look for their own salvation. Where Intuc wants the child to do away with his morbidity, Shrimant wants him to cover up his physical weakness. Finally, the child does not happen to Garbo, who plays smart with the men by consciously doing away with the child. The hypocrisy of Shrimant stands exposed towards the end when he loses control on self after learning that Garbo had deliberately killed the child. The climax inevitably leads to near melodrama, with the animosities and tensions becoming sharper till they culminate in Shrimant stabbing Garbo to death.
The drama in Garbo grows out of a claustrophobic real-life situation pushed to the limits of endurance, burgeoning into a surreal holy dream that is too unreal and brittle to stand the test.
