The Suit
Dir:Neelam Mansingh

The Play
The Company theatre’s production of THE SUIT, directed by Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry from Chandigarh was performed on 9th January 2008 at the PL Deshpande auditorium, during the National School of Drama’s (NSD) satellite festival. It happened to be a modern play in the truest sense of the word. The theme of the play follows a husband-wife relationship.

The husband treats the wife as his priced possession and as an object of lust. He further treats her like a pet and attempts to control, degrade, pamper, humiliate her- all in the name of love. There is the suggestion of boredom creeping into their marital relationship but this aspect isn’t specified in the play. But a surprise is in store when the woman expresses her love for the husband and yet does not face the guilt for her illegitimate relationship with another man.

The play is based on a story by the South African writer Can Themba. Its Indian version which is in English and Punjabi has a few cultural associations. Otherwise the theme is universal with its symbolic and easily identifiable storyline. The story is woven around a newly wedded wife that simultaneously enjoys an intimate affair with another man. The husband finds out and forces the wife to publicly carry her paramour’s suit, which he had left behind. Towards the end, the wife wears the same suit in front of her husband and replays the physical intimacy that she had with her lover. She rejects her husband’s order to take it off.

As the storyline is skeletal, it was perhaps necessary for the production to add events. The single act of the wife carrying the suit could not sustained interest for long. Moreover the temptation to create comedy resulted in a contrasting ambience and in the process the characterizations of both the man and the woman also got diluted. The director may have deliberately wanted to show the transformation of the husband- from a lover to an oppressor, after he learnt of his wife’s infidelity. But even if that was deliberate, his comic acts took away the credibility of his love as well as his brutality. The same was with the wife’s character. She like the ideal woman meekly suffers all indignities perpetuated by husband in spite of being liberated in a sense. Her refusal to remove the suit from her body- an act of revolt, is dramatic, but the preceding build-up of her illicit, physical relationship gives a different message- was it only for a variance in sexual experience that she sought the other man’s company?

Replacing the usual box set, the stage design was utilitarian. A sort of a studio apartment is created with various levels, which were put to effective use. Costumes were appropriate and so was the lighting. Both the actors were good but the comedy act by the husband in the opening scene jarred. The actor playing the woman was particularly good in the last scene, when she enacts the sexual relation with her lover as well as in the preceding one in which she dresses for her lover in her husband’s absence. The full impact of the husband’s inhuman savagery came through the staging. The images were haunting. The symbol of the suit- an innocuous looking weapon came across as a novel idea of reflecting women’s suppression. A piece of literary genius indeed.

About the Director
Neelam Mansingh crafts a new folk plus urban stylistics in mother tongue Punjabi. She calls herself twice-born. Her perception of every change as a challenge transformed her from an England-returned, anglicised, convent-educated miss in Amritsar to a theatre director crafting a new folk plus urban stylistics in mother tongue Punjabi. “To get into theatre was in itself a somersault for me. Doing Punjabi theatre was to do cartwheels.”

Establishing serious theatre in the language of “truck drivers, clowns and dhabawalas” to winning national and international acclaim took over two decades. When she founded her Company Theatre in Chandigarh (1984), Punjabi was still disdained by the elitist class of Sikhs and the Hindus had opted for Hindi. Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry used her circular journey from her home town to the big metros and back again to become one of the finest theatre directors in contemporary India. Memorable productions include “Kitchen Katha”, “An Unposted Love Letter” and “Nagamandala”. Just when critics noted repetition and creative exhaustion, Neelam came up with an eerily haunting “The Suit”(2007).

Nothing in her background guided her career choice. Her reformist forefathers conducted the first widow remarriage in Punjab. Her progressive, science-inclined family was headed by a liberal doctor-father. Hopeless at physics and maths (“I still can’t figure out how a plus b equals c!”) young Neelam read, painted and dreamt of becoming a nun. Finding herself at sea in the premedical course, she opted for history and psychology. A pulse quickened when she studied art history.

Neelam’s hand went up in class when thespian Balwant Gargi asked if anyone wanted to act in a Genet play. “I opened the script and got a new life,” she says. Around that time the legendary theatre director Ebrahim Alkazi brought “Othello” and “Jasma Odan” from the National School of Drama (NSD) to Amritsar. As a backstage volunteer, the small-town girl saw for the first time backslapping informality between the sexes. In her milieu, girls ended up as homemakers and mothers. Words like individual satisfaction and self identity were unknown. An unusual, even frightening, step for a girl from an artistically decontextualised background took Neelam to NSD.

The course was complex, traumatising. Ignorance of Hindi meant being stuck with peripheral roles. She began to learn by observation, if not by participation. Frail Alkazi seemed a Colossus. “I wanted to enter his mind. He was a master of crowd scenes, compositions, design, structure”. “Razia Sultan”, “Look Back in Anger”, “Tughlaq” were all heady stuff.