Rohinton Mistry’s novel A Fine Balance is a complex, six hundred page long saga about events during the 1975-77 State of Emergency in India. Turning it into a coherent, stageable play is a considerable feat and Anosh Irani has managed that; even if the result is a long evening at the theatre. It’s actually pretty clever. Besides the ruthless elimination of minor characters and sub-plots he handles the principal characters’ back stories by dropping in bits of information all through the narrative that allow the audience to fill in details that are otherwise not made explicit. It’s efficient and effective.
So the story is condensed down to Dina (Zorana Sadiq), a widow, trying to get by by starting a garment sub-contracting business. She hires two tailors; Ishvar (Anand Rajaram) and his nephew Om (Ben Yoganathan), and they together with her PG, Maneck (Siddharth Sharma); the student son of an old friend, carry the plot supported by Husein Mdhavji and Sugoth Varughese playing multiple roles. It’s only as the play proceeds that we learn that Dina is Parsi and the tailors are Scheduled Caste/Dalit. Which is pretty important. There are all sorts of nuances of caste and creed at play here.
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Rose in Bloom is a new recital CD from coloratura soprano Erin Morley accompanied by Gerald Martin Moor. It’s a bit of a mixed bag. There’s some really nice singing and playing but some of the music choices leave me a bit cold.
So, to continue our look at the recording history of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas we turn to the 1961 Decca recording with Janet Baker in the title role. This has won so many awards and featured on so many “best of” lists that it might reasonably be considered to serve as some sort of “gold standard”. It’s certainly very good but I’m more interested in looking at what it says about the evolution of performance practice of Dido and Aeneas than in adding to the praise for Dame Janet’s performance.
