Theatre review: The Big Fat City

Play :The Big Fat CityDirector: Mahesh Dattani Duration : 80 minutes Cast : Achint Kaur, Nasir Khan, Pooja Ruparel, Ivan Rodrigues & others Language : English Rating : 2 1/2
Joining the ranks of black or dark comedies (humour that makes light of otherwise serious subjects like death!) on stage after 'August: Osage County', we have a new play, titled The Big Fat City, which unveils the façades that most urbanites are known to put up.
Much like Mumbai, which is a melting pot of cultures, the play combines three stories — a corporate couple in a financial quandary, a popular soap star with a troubled marriage and an aspiring starlet with shocking secrets. Yet, despite their problems, all of them put up a pretentious happy front, until murder comes knocking on the door...
The story is set in a fancy Mumbai apartment, where a couple (Pooja Ruparel & Ivan Rodrigues) invite an old friend (Nasir Khan) for dinner, so that they can get some financial help in clearing off their home loan. But in a bid to save their apartment, they forget all ethics and land up becoming accomplices in the murder of their neighbour and friend’s (Achint Kaur) husband. And it’s not just them, every character puts themselves and their own agendas over truth and morality, which is a little disturbing. But then, the story revolves around the theme of what greed can do to people. People in the big fat city.
The play uses one of the newer innovative stage props — LED screens — for many scenes. In the performances, Rodrigues’ character provides much of the humour to the story while Kaur’s lends the gloomy bits, quite convincingly. Yet, for a dark comedy there are not too many laugh-out-loud moments; the comic part is mostly restricted to the first few scenes, as later, the play takes a brooding mood (minus the comedy), with reference to the Khap panchayat amongst other issues. Starting off on a very promising note, you end up feeling a little lost towards the end of this one.