The last two performances at The Urban Theatre Project recalled earlier productions there this year. Rosikata’s Jyānta Hamlet has a Mousetrap-like twist in the tail that brought to mind a similar play-acted snare in Akvarious’ Sissy, also a two-hander. Moreover, the source script, I Am Hamlet by British dramatist Richard James, with a title identical to half a dozen other texts, doesn’t score high on the originality charts despite its audition scenario because it basically compresses and tweaks Shakespeare’s plot like so many Hamlet-made-easy reductions.
Still, two of adapter-director Avignan Bhattacharya’s additions make perfect sense: the director’s alcoholism (replacing James’ coffee-drinking) enables the avenger to win his trust and dull his brains, while the double dose of poison matches Hamlet doubly ensuring that he kills Claudius. Bhattacharya and Rishav Basu act the parts convincingly and speaking bilingually—mostly in Bengali between themselves, and the lines from Hamlet in the original English, except that Bhattacharya must improve his much-too guttural English diction so that spectators can follow and relish Shakespeare’s words. Basu has fewer problems in this department.
Playhouse’s Garam Roti reminded me of the much superior Kheyechish?, also from Mumbai, in both of which a solo actress presents the circumstances of her growing up, and concludes with the sharing of cooked food with audience members. Writer-director-performer Durga Venkatesan demonstrates exemplary trilingual fluency in Hindi, English and Tamil, but her monologue does not touch us deeply until the last 20 minutes when she finally zeroes in on women’s unrecognized labour in the kitchen, and her reliance on songs and female documentary voices from a CD player that “talks” to her sounds forced and consumes disproportionate time.
(27 September 2026)