Melbourne Talam

Melbourne Talam
By Rashma N. Kalsie. Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC Education). Southbank Theatre, The Lawler. 4-20 May 2017

Talam, as playwright Rashma N Kalsie tells us in a program note, ‘is a term used in Indian music… the base on which the notes of musical composition and poetry rest… the rhythmic cycle of a musical competition… [Here] talam means the rhythm of Melbourne.’  That is, there’s a rhythm to the city that you ‘get’ or you don’t – and if you don’t, life can be alienated, lonely and maybe poor and hungry too.  The play tells the stories of three young people from the sub-continent – from Delhi, from Hyderabad, and from Gurdaspur – trying to find and sync with that Melbourne talam. 

After a beginning of joyous and spirited music and dancing - familiar from Bollywood movies or, for some, just Slumdog Millionaire - we find ourselves on cold, grey underground Platform 3 of Flagstaff Station in Melbourne.  Our three young Indians have just missed their trains.  Sonali Chugh (Sonya Suares), elegant and well-spoken, spends much of the play complaining to the audience about her lot in life.  An upper-class girl back in Delhi, she broke the rules of arranged marriages and now suffers the consequences.  She intended to be an ‘independent woman’ in Australia, but she’s a shop assistant, struggling to make ends meet, her workmates exclude her, she’s lonely and (subtext) sexually experienced so just a little horny.  Jasminder Singh (Rohan Mirchandaney) is a proud Sikh student with not-so-good English and so broke he can’t pay his next semester fees – and if he’s not enrolled in something, no visa.  Poornachandra Rao (Sahil Saluja) seems the most adult of the three, yet he can sink to rage and frustration in an instant and then regain his optimistic self again just as quickly.  He works at an IT firm with an Anglo Boss, and he’s always anxious that he’ll be sent back to Hyderabad.  What hangs over all three, particularly the ‘warrior’ Sikh, is the shame of failure should they have to ‘give up’ and go home.

As each one tells their developing story, the station platform (design by Andrew Bailey, lighting by Rachel Burke) also stands in for apartments, workplaces and ‘homes’ back in India.  The other actors step into supporting roles to play relatives, employers, flatmates or potential lovers.  The storytelling – keeping three story strands alive and in balance – sometimes seems not quite to have found its talam: some scenes are too short, minor characters too brief, moments are scraps of illustration that don’t develop.  Nevertheless, there are flashes of humour, ironic and black, and the stories go to dark places: the inevitable racism, dirty, overcrowded shared flats, corruption and trickery in the workplace, injury, despair and shame.  But each strand is brought to a feel-good but credible and satisfying resolution.

Ms Suares is a most attractive and confident performer, but her rather one note character seems to restrict her, while her bit parts in the others’ stories could have more texture, fleeting though they are.  Mr Saluja has a great deal of easy, attractive charm (think Dev Patel and his smile) in his main role, but his depiction of a sour, pessimistic Sikh flat leader has toughness and weight.  The most confident of the three is Mr Mirchandaney.  A comedian elsewhere, here he exhibits a wide range.  In his main role, the anxious Sikh, he balances pathos and a faltering but dogged spirit, and his minor roles are complete and amusing transformations.  Director Petra Kalive has done an accomplished task in weaving together and transitioning between so many characters and strands, despite the occasional infelicities of the text.

Melbourne Talam reveals the struggles of some Indians (and by extension, many other Asians), coming from far more ‘traditional’ societies, burdened with heavy and perhaps unreal expectations, and trying to succeed and find a place in Melbourne.  It does so without sentimentality, but with grit and humour and also a kind of sweetness.  If it is a little rough around the edges, it is still a work in progress and well worth seeing.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Jeff Busby.

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