Theatre review: Dear Father

The play "Dear Father" stars Paresh Rawal and was playing recently in London. I wasn’t able to find any reviews of the play and went for it purely because of the star power of Paresh Rawal. He is a great actor and so this would be a great play.

Dear Father is a comedy-thriller-suspense-social-message play all rolled into one. It is based on the lives of a son, his wife and his father, which is turned upside down when the father (Paresh Rawal) ends up in hospital after falling from their terrace. A cop (also played by Paresh Rawal) lands up at their place, and what follows is a dissection of the last few days of the household leading up to the father’s accident, and also an unraveling of the issues between the three that had cropped up over those days.

This play actually felt at times like a saas-bahu serial except that there was no saas but a sasur:). The issues were the same, the father had a lot of time at hand and found mistakes with the wife. The wife did not like that and was unreasonable with the father. The son who was stuck in between was unreasonable with both. The cop takes the son and wife through a journey of introspection and guilt to make them realise that their behaviour towards their father has been wrong and unjust.

But somehow, I did not come out convinced. Even though the acting was great, I thought the conclusion that the cop had got them to had been one-sided and not justified. The cast had been let down by a weak script. If that was better, this may have been a great play given the superlative acting by the whole cast (plus the humour and comedy in the script, which was enjoyable).

Would go for only 2.5 stars for this one.