There is a whole lot of good writing about The Blue Mug online. Linking to the articles I enjoyed most.

Unboxed Writers has an amazingly detailed review.

Have you noticed, how for every point, life offers a counterpoint? As if to remind you that for every ‘this,’ there is a ‘that? And for every Delhi Belly, there is The Blue Mug?

Read the full review – Memory is a Blue Mug.

I was sore about being quoted out of context in this Indian Express article, but my complaint seems trivial after reading Bijoy Venugopal’s experience with a "hack" from Mid-Day.

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Our lives are shaped by memories. Incidents from years ago that struck so deep their vibrations still live within us, that have made us into the people we are today. The Blue Mug is a recounting of such memories, by a formidable line-up of actors – Vinay Pathak, Rajat Kapoor, Munish Bhardwaj, Sheeba Chaddha. In a fluid criss-cross, the actors take turns to narrate vignettes from their lives. The stories are as varied as the people telling them – sleeping on the terrace on summer nights, deaths of loved ones, visits of big-city kids to their ancestral home in a small town, circus jokers that strike you with terror.

In between real-life narratives of the cast comes a slice of fiction: the tale of Joginder (Ranvir Shorey), a Sikh man whose brain is stuck in a time warp – he can remember nothing of his life beyond 1983.

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It is probably significant that Boy With A Suitcase skips "The" from its title, shifting focus from "the boy" Naz, a 12-year old war refugee, to the concept of a personal journey towards maturity, with a small load of possessions, both material and psychological.

A joint production of Ranga Shankara and Schnawwl-National Theatre of Germany (called Do I know U?), Boy With A Suitcase is a bildungsroman that follows Naz as he is sent off on a bus by his parents towards the land of "milk and honey". What follows is the kind of arduous adventure Naz’s hero Sindbad could proudly put on his resume: gunfire, wild animal chase, sweatshop, escape, dangerous crossing of water, crawling reach to the destination, disillusionment and eventual acceptance. The lines between fact and fable are fuzzy – we are never quite sure which era or which city we are looking at. And that’s all right – the point is not the place and time but the indomitable spirit of survival.

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To bring alive a character on stage is hard enough, but to bring alive a sense of place far more. A film can be shot on location, here all you have is the stage. And so, Harlesden High Street sets itself up for a challenge – Harlesden, a modest area in London with a large immigrant population, has as big a role to play in this narrative as the people inhabiting it. The play traces a day in the lives of three Pakistani immigrants in Harlesden, each with their stories of finding themselves in this foreign land, and their personal struggles to obliterate that word  ‘foreign’.

The play isn’t so much about this day as any other, or even about these specific people than any other. Rehaan, Karim and Karim’s Ammi might as well be Rahim, Kabir and Kabir’s Ammi. Their stories are generic enough to be replaceable by equally interesting stories of another cross-section from the immigrant population. Harlesden High Street isn’t about what makes people unique, it’s about what makes different people the same.

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Do you know that feeling when you’re eating a dish with relish, in leisured bite sizes, when someone jogs your elbow and the last spoonful you were all set to savour drops to the floor?

Much of my Full Meals experience was like that. But let me begin at the beginning.

The deal is a series of six mini-plays, cushioned with short acts by a pair of actors in imaginative roles (dead superheroes to restaurant waiters to statues in a park!). The mini-plays stand by themselves without interlinks, only the actors get shared.

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String Theatre Marionettists, a London-based troupe, staged their puppet show, The Red Balloon, in Bangalore recently. The marionettist duo, Stan Middleton – a 3rd generation marionette, and Soledad Zarate, a marionette operator with Movingstage for the last four years, visited Bangalore as part of their All India tour. The show was organized by Yours Truly theatre of Bhagwaan Dhundoo and The Common Man fame.

Back home in London, these shows are generally staged in a tourist boat, with children seated at the center and adults at both ends of each row. Yours Truly theatre replicated this at ADA Rangamandira, the venue of the show, thus facilitating an unobstructed view to their primary audience. The seating arrangements were also made only on one half of the auditorium for the same purpose (see the seating plan below). They lost out on revenue because of this though :). I also liked the way their volunteers mingled with kids before the show and made the tough job of convincing kids to move away from their parents (to ensure optimal usage of limited number of seats) look easy.

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