Good acting makes English play Fool’s Paradise a riveting watch

NAGPUR: Brightening up an otherwise drowsy Saturday afternoon was English play ‘Fool’s Paradise’ presented by Stagecraft at Guru Nanak Bhavan auditorium of Department of Fine Arts. An adaptation of PG Wodeshouse’s Bachelors Anonymous by Ankita Athawale, the play took the audience through lives of seven characters desperately trying to ward off even a whiff of romance from their lives.
The one and a half-hour play brings on stage a playwright who is falling in love with a scribe, a film producer freshly out of a failed marriage trying to avoid another one, a lawyer who is the front-runner of feminism but nevertheless succumbs to pressure of finding someone to spend her life with, a carefree traveller who goes down hook line and sinker for a catch that would otherwise appear most inappropriate for him.
Athawale in her adaptation switches the gender of characters to fit them in the Indian scenario. So the scribe Girish Modi has to kick the habit of smoking for two years if he wants the inheritance left behind by an uncle. But the conversation between Modi and his playwright friend Joyita Arya by the seaside give room to contemporary sensibilities with feminism being the front-runner.
The play rides on the fine acting by the cast, the best in Stagecraft stable. The immensely talented Nitish Chandra as Amrit Lal, styled after Ivor Llewellyn, the successful film magnet in the book, acts well and looks the part in his flashy shirts, hat and gold chains. Bianca Nazareth Arya in the role of the lawyer Devika Sundar works as a balance for all the idiosyncrasies but later becomes a part of it. Raveesh Jaiswal as Modi, Vivek Daga as the slick and savvy Karan Motiyal who falls for the nurse Saraswati Pandharpurkar, played by Sonal Trivedi Malkan and Onkar Ghare as Niranjan Soni who tries to understand the intricacies of arranged marriage from Devika, deliver with aplomb. But long drawn dialogues make the play very verbose and leave no room for pauses, silent expressions or emotions.
Describing the adaptation as brilliant for the manner in which the story merges in an contemporary urban Indian scenario, Vikash Khurana the director of the play said, “The play is based on a novel and books are verbose. Here the actors had to even create the environment through their dialogues. We deliberately took this work of Wodehouse as this story could easily fit into Indian scenario.”