Playwright: Rahul da Cunha

Director: Rahul da Cunha

Language: English

Duration: 1 hr 15 minutes

Theatre group: Rage Productions

Cast: Ashwin Mushran, Bugs Bhargava Krishna, Rajit Kapur, Shankar Sachdev, Yamini Namjoshi

 

Rage Production’s Pune Highway is a telling account of the dynamic of friendships. The play’s plot chalks out the aftermath of a murder on the Pune Highway. The victim’s three friends Promod, Vishnu and Nicholas find refuge from the incident at the squalid ‘Hotel Moonligt’, where they go through a spectrum of guilt, nostalgia, laughter, fear and aggression. To add to their woes, Promod’s fling Mona, daughter of politico Sanjay Mansekar threatens them with letting on their secret. What follows are a series of what-nexts.

 

Pune Highway, is a relatively gripping and lively play with many twists and turns punctuated with social commentary, language related jokes, one-liners and other devices used to elicit humour. While they work at one level, they also take away from the play’s main thread. The act has none of the urgency or murkiness that follows murder and you wonder if these three men have genuinely lost a friend to murder or if they are just three friends, making confessions and conversations, on a casual outing.

 

The characters, however, are extremely well –sketched; Nicholas with a stammer and a troubled childhood; Promod with his contradictory conservative upbringing and his ‘James Bond lifestyle’ and Vish with a practical bent of mind and deductive reasoning are all clever creations. 

 

The performances too are adequate; Rajit and Ashwin play Promod and Vishnu respectively with unfailing candour. The show belongs though to Bugs Bhargava Krishna (Nikki), who elicits much clapping and hooting and to Yamini Namjoshi(Mona) who although appears only briefly is a perfect gaze-catcher, in a text otherwise quite male-dominated, both in theme and content.  

 

The set is a true-to-life re-creation of the seedy ‘Hotel Moonligt’ and the light and sound complement the play’s action quite well. Problems lie however, in the resolution of the play. The last ten minutes leave you wondering if this is the intended ending or if it is barely an indecisive tying together of elements.