Synopsis
Matra Ratra is an hour long-play produced by Aasakta in Marathi. Aasakta has always experimented with production styles and technique in each play. The play reveals 17 nights in the life of a modern-day young urban couple Nilu and Anju. When Nilu and Anju manage to escape their annoying roommate Radha and get their own flat, the couple is overjoyed. Anju is a working woman and works for a leading boutique in the city whereas Nilu is a playwright without much success.
Appreciating the fact of having a whole new space for making violent and loud sex, Night after night appears a story of romantic, mush filled love. But the story doesn’t fulfil in true sense and they soon find their bliss is short-lived. Articulating and expressing the love for one another they also whine and complain about all possible issues. Added to it, they also bitch about a close friend supposedly the best gossip monger, cheap rumour spreader in the whole wide world. They also fearlessly express their failures and inabilities in their respective lives. To be precise they ride on all petty seeming issues, which for that particular moment is the most important thing to be addressed and come on cue to say ‘I LOVE YOU’ most passionately. They don’t just restrict to saying this but physically indulge in intense love making. Coming together till reasons lighter than feathers pull them apart, yelling and cursing each other finally crusading to the cue to say how much they love each other. On one single bed, night after night cuddling in each others arms, finally the questions start popping.
This light veined play examines the age-old questions couples must face every day: Is it better to tell love stories to each other, or just watch TV? Should men be forced to go for shopping? Should the fan be on even though it makes an annoying sound? Does love really exists or is it just a big reasonable nonsense?
Directors Note
These 17 scenes cut out for us, the “sitcom flavoured – Americanized” cross-section of the world of this couple. The technique and the setting are such that the audience too feels as if indulging in voyeurism. The audience almost becomes a “Peeping Tom”!
Set in an urban present, creating this theatre piece, I was strongly tugged by the idea that there was so much that could be discovered in terms of a language of expression when the space was confined to a single bed. The performances amount to the process of discovering oneself, of holding to one’s loneliness and at the same time making a contact with the world outside. It concentrates on the consciousness of a modern day couple or more precisely a man and a woman. Today in this global world love merges into hatred, diametrically opposites are the rule and fragility and uncertainty dominates these prized relationships. Love, fear, joy, hope, trust together intermingle to produce a universe of situations and absurdities camouflaged as a dramatic dialogue that unfolds in a fascinating mixture of the comic and dreadful.
