THEATRE REVIEW: ROSHNI
29 Nov'10

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

When it comes to story ideas, playwright Anusree Roy seems to have tapped into a veritable motherlode  — one that runs both deep and wide and will surely never be exhausted.

For while other playwrights might choose to explore grand lives lived on the world stage, Roy has chosen to train her focus on the lives that a North American audience would never encounter, rooted as the are not only in the Indian sub-continent but on the millions who inhabit its lower classes and call India home. In short, people like the pair of urchins at the heart of ROSHNI, Roy's latest play, currently on Theatre Passe Muraille's mainstage, where it was developed in partnership with Theatre Jones Roy.

Roy herself is cast as one of those urchins — a blind shoeshine girl named Chumki who relies heavily on the rough and tumble kindness of a chai boy named King Kumar, played here by Byron Abalos.

Largely abandoned by their families — in the wake of her mother's death, Chumki's father thinks only of drink, while King Kumar's closest living relative is an uncle living from hand to mouth in another city — the two eke out an existence in a crowded rail station in Calcutta in any way they can. Living their lives from hand to mouth, each has a dream of a better life, and while Chumki works tirelessly to save the money to buy an operation to restore her sight, King Kumar begs, borrows and steals in order to save the money to join his uncle and become a Bollywood star. Each is certain that his or her dream will come true, even while each knows that the other's dream is nothing more than fantasy.

It's a dilemma worthy of a tale by O. Henry, albeit an O. Henry of a more cynical age, and the two member cast makes the most of it, inhabiting the sprawling confines of Lindsay Anne Black's corrugated set, under the direction of Thomas Morgan Jones and making it ring with life.

As she has amply proved in her earlier works like PYAASA and LETTERS TO MY GRANDMA, Roy is a charming performer and she brings to the character of the hapless Chumki a blend of toughness and vulnerability that is certain to steal lots of hearts. And she is matched at almost every turn by Abalos, who gives us a King Kumar whose strutting confidence almost succeeds in masking his vulnerability and finally the desperation that drives him to betrayal.

But, in the end, it is a small jewel of a story — which is the kind of story that Roy seems to tell best — and despite the best efforts of lighting designer David DeGrow and the sound design of Thomas Rider Payne, this talented twosome and their creative team simply has neither the chops nor the story to fill the sprawling confines of this stage.

Sometimes bigger is simply bigger.