Amateur cast pulls off Samahaara Theatre's The Good Doctor with ardour

Plot: Adapted into plays by American playwright Neil Simon,

The Good Doctor

is a collection of four short stories written by celebrated Russian physician-turned playwright and short-story writer

Anton Chekov

that originally appeared as newspaper articles. The first play, titled The Sneeze, is a story of an over-apologetic civil servant Ivan Ilyech Chedyakov and what happens when one evening he accidently sneezes upon his superior at work. The second play, The Drowned Man revolves around a compulsive writer and a tramp, who proposes to entertain the former with his brand of ‘maritime entertainment’. While the third story, The Governess, is about an officious employer who cheats a meek governess off her wages only to make her stand up for her rights, the fourth one, The Defenseless Creature, is a tale of an old, battered woman, Madam Shtchukin, who visits a bank to collect her ailing husband’s dues. All the individual storylines are loosely held together by a narrator who, it is made to assume, is Chekov himself.

Review: With a minimalist set and a bunch of debutants straight out of

Samahaara Theatre

Oriented Production Workshop at her disposal, director Nasreen Ishaque managed to pull off a rather amusing production. Bulk of the credit however goes to Simon’s script for dramatising Chekov’s take on the society of 19th century USSR and highlighting different human frailties. Prashant Singh Jadon as the writer, the only unifying element between the different stories, did a neat job for a debutant and managed to hook the crowd from the inception with his introductory monologue. In The Sneeze, Adarsh Challa as Ivan Ilyech Chedyakov seemed to have tried every trick he knew to pull off the character and was somewhat successful. The highlight of the entire cast however, were Deepti Shikha and Aditi Kandpal in multiple roles. While Deepti put up an earnest show in The Defenseless Creature as Madam Shtchukin with all the slapstick, Aditi’s performance as the imperious employer in the The Governess was poised and convincing. Nitesh Gupta in The Drowned Man too did a decent job playing the tramp with the essential demeanour of a vagrant. The weak links in the cast however were Srinath Kotha as the general in The Sneeze and Soorya Kosaraju as the writer in The Drowned Man. Both their performances were wooden and they didn’t look comfortable in their characters at all.

Art wise, even though a lot of scenes occur in a variety of locales, the requirements of set for this play are simple. The score maintained an upbeat, piano-driven composition during blackouts and light play too was kept to the bare minimum without much drama, enabling the audience to focus only on the characters.

Verdict: Considering they were written during the dawn of communism in Soviet Russia, Chekov’s stories had some serious proletariat vs bourgeoisie undercurrents in them. Though gift-wrapped in comedy of manners, all the stories highlighted the plight of the working class and their oppression at the hands of the elite. And director Nasreen did a commendable job in marching her troop of amateurs to give the
audience a glimpse of the society of the said era. While the stories do induce some serious food for thought, the production was an elementary one — more like a chosen platform for the young guns to get a taste of
being on stage.