Not every day does an awardwinning play from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival come to Kolkata, or an international act inaugurate its India tour in Kolkata. Embarrassingly under-advertised, Krishnan’s Dairy by Indian Ink from New Zealand enchanted its sparse audiences at the ICCR. The production and company date back to 1997 and its Edinburgh First prize to 1999, but it has travelled the world since, and writer-actor Jacob Rajan grown older performing it.
It illuminates two universally important issues, ironically at a time when increasingly rightist culture besieges them. The first is the mom-and-pop neighbourhood shop round the corner, succumbing to the monster malls and supermarket chains where we buy our retail nowadays. The second is the labour and initiative of immigrants to make an honest living in the country they adopt. These coalesce in an Indian couple who run a convenience store in small-town New Zealand, like many in diasporic communities. Rajan models his story as “a love letter to my parents whose courage and sacrifice led them to seek their fortune so far from home.”
The father, Krishnan, opens a “dairy” (New Zealand-speak for corner shop) while his homesick wife, wanting to return to India, helps him and raises their baby. Simple daily routine interspersed with troubles, such as racist slurs, comprise the narrative until a shocking robbery ends his life; in the last scene we see that she took over afterwards and the baby has become a young man. Rajan enacts both parents impeccably and bilingually, using lightning-fast changes of masks and vocal registers, with precision timing of sound effects. He also dons a double-headed mask as Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal, about whose love the mother tells her child, contrasted with the cruelty the emperor meted out to his artisans who worked on the Taj. The director, Justin Lewis, could curtail some of Shah Jahan’s romance, which meanders.
More suitable as children’s theatre, Calcutta School of Music and ThinkArts presented The Art of the Fugue by the Swiss group Il Funambolo, also featuring a soloist, Ava Loiacono, who ventriloquizes with perfection her hand puppets of a duck and a rabbit, accompanied by Western classical music. But the script, by director Mauro Guindani, sticks to convention, since the duck aspires to swan-hood. Perhaps we should redirect children from such misleading ideals of physical beauty, to show them that an “ugly duckling” can, and indeed does, achieve beauty as an adult duck – or drake.
(From The Telegraph, 19 November 2016)