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Theatre review: The Good, The Bad And The Sholay

SINGAPORE — What happens when you put a coming-of-age story and a Bollywood film together? You get the rip-roaring experience that is The Good, The Bad And The Sholay.

It's time for Bollywood: Checkpoint Theatre's The Good, The Bad And The Sholay. Photo: The Esplanade

It's time for Bollywood: Checkpoint Theatre's The Good, The Bad And The Sholay. Photo: The Esplanade

SINGAPORE — What happens when you put a coming-of-age story and a Bollywood film together? You get the rip-roaring experience that is The Good, The Bad And The Sholay.

In the sold-out Checkpoint Theatre production at the Esplanade’s Indian arts festival Kalaa Utsavam (after an initial staging in 2011 at the National University of Singapore Arts Festival), young playwright Shiv Tandan interweaves autobiographical moments about growing up in the Indian city of Ambala and moving to Singapore to study at NUS, with the 1970s classic “curry western” Sholay (the play’s title, too, riffs on that Clint Eastwood spaghetti western The Good, The Bad And The Ugly).

Tandan’s proxy character Raghav takes us to his own version of The Wonder Years, with light-hearted and funny anecdotes about his family, friends, love life and a quirky hometown where traffic lights are a novelty and blackouts are not. He contrasts this with his experience adjusting to shiny Singapore where “traffic is so disciplined it was like a video game” and the Indian scholars in university were “the most fractured community in campus”.

At the same time, you’re also watching the story of Sholay unfold: A retired policeman named Thakur has hired a couple of gunslinging thieves, Veeru and Jai, to help apprehend the dastardly Gabbar Singh, a marauding bandit with the strangest trademark laugh.

With such a wealth of colourful moments and scenes from India and Indian cinema, you would have expected a kind of in-your-face sensory experience. But co-directors Huzir Sulaiman and Tandan take the opposite, minimalist approach — a sparse setting where the ensemble of eight performers basically do just about everything: From performing as multiple characters to transforming their bodies into their own props (assembling together as a horsecart, for instance). They even provide their own sound-effects: The bang of a gunshot, the swooshing flip of a coin, the muted sounds at a club, the melody and rhythms of the many songs.

The directors wholeheartedly embrace the language of cinema, from swift jump cuts to slow-motion moments, with often hilarious results.

In The Good, The Bad And The Sholay’s stripped-down world, the imagination runs wild — and not just the audience’s. At the heart of Tandan’s play is a tale of transition, that moment before one grows up, and the performers’ play-acting evokes that sense of youthful innocence as if for one last time.

And what a wonderful play-acting performance it was by the ensemble that effortlessly transports you into the two overlapping worlds of the real and the fictional.

And while all the actors put on commendable individual shifts — Ghafir Akbar’s role as the main character’s pre-teen, plugged-in younger brother is our sentimental favourite — one should really see them as a single group. It was a delight watching their tightly choreographed sequences, whether it’s cycling through the roads of Ambala or, again, the Bollywood dance numbers. Their energy was so infectious, the audience was spontaneous clapping at some points on the first night.

We won’t be surprised if turns out to be a regular thing during its brief run. Mayo Martin

 

The Good, The Bad And The Sholay, which runs until Sunday at the Esplanade Theatre Studio, is sold out.

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