BackClub Desire | Blood on the nightclub floor
Sunil Shanbag's new play 'Club Desire' takes cues from the classic opera 'Carmen'
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Chahat’s toe is feeling the texture of Jayam’s pants. His already wide eyes go 70mm, even as she unblinkingly continues to make her way around his body and heart.
Things are heating up in a room on the eighth floor of the Sardar Patel Institute of Technology at the Bhavan’s College campus in north Mumbai, where a rehearsal for Sunil Shanbag’s upcoming stage production Club Desire is in progress. Since Club Desire, which will open in Mumbai on 24 October, is inspired by Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen, it follows that Chahat wears her sexual neediness on her sleeve. As performed by television actor and singer Manasi Parekh Gohil, Chahat lives up to her name, but she acquires greater character when she picks up a mic and sings, “Plummeting rising lurching capsizing lovering mothering distancing othering flirting baiting counter-moving checkmating shredding grating stripping mating", ending with the refrain, “The heart is a verb—and it hurts".
It pays to listen carefully when Chahat sings the blues, since the introspective, piercing and often brittle lyrics are by poet Arundhathi Subramaniam. Chahat’s theme song indicates that she is no unitonal seductress. She says, “My demons are original, so is my point of view, and there’s only one thing I’m bloody sure of, I’d rather not be you."
Getting Subramaniam to be a part of Club Desire was a minor coup. “She initially agreed to write one song, and she ended up giving me five," Shanbag says.
Written by Sapan Saran, the 100-minute play unfolds in a nightclub, where Chahat works and is first spotted by poet Jayam, played by Faisal Rashid. Chahat’s love for the idealistic Jayam is eclipsed by her curiosity about the newly hired DJ Abir, played by Karan Pandit, whose experimental looping casts a spell on Chahat, not altogether to Jayam’s liking.
The familiar tale of love, betrayal, possessiveness and tragedy that has given Carmen staying power over the decades (it was first written in the mid-19th century) and through various adaptations and experiments (a flamenco-based version; a hip-hop setting) gets a few extra layers in its latest creative work-out. “Carmen is every man’s fantasy and nightmare," says Shanbag, who has previously directed such plays as Cotton 56; Polyester 84;Dreams of Taleem; and Stories in a Song. “The conflicted passion is what makes it so attractive."
However, Club Desire is more than just a battle of wills between the seducer and the seduced, adds the 57-year-old director. “We have added to the original story—each of the characters is an artiste passionate about his or her mode of expression," he says. Jayam recites Hindi poetry (written by Sapan Saran), Chahat sings indie grungy music (composed by Suhas Ahuja), while Abir pushes the envelope on EDM (the actual DJing is by Rohan Hastak).
Music, which has been an important feature of Shanbag’s productions in recent years, will also drive the plot in Club Desire. A live band will accompany Gohil as she sings her tracks, and the climax will bring together the various musical styles. “I did a gentle probe in Cotton 56, and music has now become my signature," Shanbag says. He had originally planned to stage Girish Karnad’s Naga-Mandala, but instead shifted tracks to casting and rehearsing for Club Desire. He had previously worked with Gohil in his last production Maro Piyu Gayo Rangoon, a Gujarati adaptation of William Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well.
Club Desire has been produced by her company, Soul Sutra, along with Shanbag’s theatre group Arpana and the National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA) in Mumbai. The set is “miminalist as usual", Shanbag says, with the bulk of the stage dedicated to Chahat’s domain, the club.
“Everything happens within the universe of Club Desire, which you can never really leave," he says. A song that isn’t likely to fade out in a hurry is the evocative A Veteran of Catastrophe: “I’m a veteran… of the News at Nine and homoeopathic tablets and timeshare vacations and acrylic emulsion on the walls…. A veteran at catastrophe… Of modular kitchens and plates non-breakable and silences older than Chippendale."
Club Desire will be staged from 24-27 October at 7pm at Tata Theatre, NCPA, Nariman Point. Tickets, priced at ₹ 300, ₹ 500, ₹ 760 and ₹ 1,000, are available at in.bookmyshow.com.
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