Theatre director Nikunj Wadhawan’s Sweet Suite, a Hindi adaptation of Ray Cooney’s Out of Order, will make you laugh till your stomach aches. By Ayushi Sharma
Who doesn’t like a comedy of errors? Even William Shakespeare did. For it hilariously teaches us about the different ways in which human beings react when they are faced with unavoidable circumstances. Directed by Nikunj Wadhawan, Sweet Suite is a Hindi adaptation of Ray Cooney’s comedy play Out of Order, which deals with a similar concept.
Wadhawan says, “It’s basically a situational comedy, where the characters create a condition which turns out to be a comedy. It was way back in July 2018, I was reading through Cooney’s play. He is know as the farcical king. Many of his plays like Run For Your Wife and Not Now Darling have been adapted without giving him royalty or taking his permission. So we took the rights to adapt this play to Hindi. And the play whenever gets adapted in a different language, the title can be changed. And Out of Order has already an internationally acclaimed status. So I changed the title to Sweet Suite.”
The play features a government secretary who lies his way out of situations with the help of his innocent junior PA, who gets more and more entangled in the improvised tales as the events unfold. The action takes place in a suite in a posh hotel and everything revolves around the accidents caused by a defective sash window. “Mr Das is the secretary to the Cabinet Minister. He has a PA who he brings to the hotel. There’s a meeting happening in his suite but the secretary has sneaked into the room of a young lady from the opposition. Now there’s also an affair going on in the hotel. There are certain things that they find inside the hotel, because of which there are many lies that keep building up. The window of the room has a dead body stuck in it. Now only three people know about it — Mr Das, his PA and the young lady. What you have to see is how in the two hours, they get out of the situation safely,” says Wadhawan and adds, “The audience had actually complained of stomach ache because they laughed so uncontrollably during the show. When I was reading the original play, it had the same effect on me.”
The director tells us that it’s a farce comedy that aims at entertaining the audience through situations that are highly exaggerated, extravagant and thus improbable. Wadhawan feels that any genre of comedy is just a way to entertain people. There can definitely be a message at the end. “Take theatre and cinema, for instance, entertainment in any form is something that attracts people and that is why it’s an important medium to give a message also. When people leave all their worries behind and they are actually laughing and relaxing, you can explain the hard-hitting reality of the world to them and they understand it better in that moment. That is why comedy is used for moral policing also. However, here, the play is just for entertainment,” says Wadhawan and adds, “There is no moral policing here. We are not trying to teach anything to anyone. I, as a director, believe that people are already aware of everything and they learn at their own pace. They don’t have to be taught about anything.”
Since it’s an adaptation, what are the new elements here? He tells us that it’s the exact original. But there is just one important thing which has changed from 1990 to now. That is the mobile phones. “There were no phones at that time but in this digital era, if you don’t have one, you either don’t belong to this planet or you are a small kid. The audience has become quite intelligent today. They cross-question. They don’t want to leave their mind back at home. Even while watching a comedy they’ll ask yeh aise kaise hogya or voh kaise hua.That is why we already let the audience know that we are not using the phone so even they should not in between the performance. And also if you have a phone, the situation will never occur,” says the director.
The play has had a long run in UK when it was first premiered in 1990 and was then adapted to French in 1996, followed by a Hungarian film. It collected accolades internationally as it entered the APAC region in 2012 with the show being staged at Singapore and Malaysia. The play currently runs in Russia and China and is all set to tickle the funny bone of the Indian audience.
(The play will be staged on August 31 and September 1 at 4 pm and 7 pm at Little Theatre Group (LTG) Auditorium, Mandi House.)
