Skip to main content

Kanjoos - The Miser

Dundee Rep
3 stars
As the global village gets smaller, so the comedic appeal of Moliere 
grows more universal. We've known this in Scotland for years, ever 
since Liz Lochhead ripped into Tartuffe in the 1980s. More
recently, poet  Roger McGough put a Scouse spin on the same. Now 
Scots-Asian comic writer Hardeep Singh Kohl and director Jatinda Verma 
have transposed Patricia Dreyfuss' translation of the French farceur's 
study of stinginess to a contemporary cartoon India.

This lends a pertinence to the tale of Harjinder's thwarted scheme to 
buy himself a marriage on the cheap, both in its depiction of austerity 
culture, and of a society where arranged marriages are still
prevalent. This makes for a far brighter affair than such observations 
might imply, as both Harjinder's son Kishore and daughter Dimple 
attempt to put love before money.

While there are some vivid stylings in Verma's youthful-looking 
production, particularly in Antony Bunsee's depiction of a decrepit 
Harjinder, it takes a real poet to make such a yarn fly, and references 
to Slumdog Millionaire and Bollywood aren't quite enough to move things 
beyond the superficial. There is fun to be had, however, with Krupa 
Pattani's cheeky maid, and with Caroline Kilpatrick's posh English 
go-betweeen Frosine, a woman so obsessed with the exotic allure of 
Indian spirituality that her "kundalinis are kinetic."

The best thing by far about this show is the live three-piece band led 
by musical director and keyboardist Danyal Dhondy, and featuring 
compositions by percussionist Hassan Mohgyedddin and singer Sohini 
Alam. With the cast lip-synching to Alam's vocalisations, the trio fuse 
low-key Indo-jazz with a music hall brio that puts real spark into a 
lovely but at times flat affair.

The Herald, March 1st 2013

ends



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h