Theatre Review : Broken Images

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Broken Images is a short one-hour (and one-act) play with only one actor, Shabana Azmi. She has a double role though; one is the novelist, Manjula who is in a TV studio talking about her book written in English, while the other 'role' is her again (her alter-ego?) on the TV screen talking to Manjula and questioning her. The events of her life slowly open, as the alter-ego questions, discusses, argues and talks to Manjula, slowly and slowly bringing out facts about her own life, her sister on who's life the book is based, the events leading to her sister's death, the relationship between her sister and her husband, the breaking of her marriage and the eventual publishing of the book.

Frankly, I found it another of those 'dysfunctional Indian families with multiple skeletons in their cupboards' kind of story which Indian play writers love to portray. An event gets all these skeletons out of the closet and everything thereafter changes. ...

The acting was good as expected, the writing tight. Was actually a nice well directed and acted play. Just that have had enough of these types of plays to like them anymore...

P.S. Apparently there is another layer to this play, of the Indian English writers being compared with their vernacular writing counterparts. The play at some level is trying to depict that the Indian writers writing in English are not betraying their motherland, and they love Indian culture and ethos and understand it as well as the Indian writers who prefer to write in their mother tongue. Personally though, this interpretation is too far-fetched for the average theatre go-er.

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