We seem to make them what we want them to make us seem,’ says the director’s note to the programme of The Blue Mug, about memories and their effect on us. A show based on Oliver Sacks’ seminal collection of case histories of neurological disorders, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the play is a radical departure from a scripted exploration of psychology. The Blue Mug takes on multiple forms, blending testimony, soliloquy and spontaneous memory into performance.

Excerpts from an interview with director Atul Kumar:

When did you first read Oliver Sacks’ book? How did its dramatic possibilities take shape in your mind?
I read it in 2000. I also read some of his other works and it was evident that simply playing out his stories in dramatic form would be boring. So we started looking for the essential ailments of his patients and found that there should be much to explore in our own memories, its losses, remembering and forgetting.

Your director’s note speaks of your preoccupation with mirth. Have audiences reacted to The Blue Mug purely as a comic play?
Not at all. They laugh but go back extremely moved. Especially with the enactment of the Jimmy G story called The Lost Mariner which is played by Ranvir Shorey and Konkona Sen Sharma. There are enough dark and heavy moments in the play that brought out memories from the extremely personal, deep abyss of actors’ minds, which they share with the audience.

What was your process in selecting actors to work with this text, particularly Konkona?
The actors in this play are friends I have been working with for the last many years, some as many as 20 years. The only new person is Konkona, who I met a few years ago. We knew immediately that we had a teammate in her for this play. She plays the doctor to Ranvir’s patient from Sacks’ story in his book. participating in creating not only her scenes but those of others’ as well through research and improvisations. Konkona’s contribution is priceless.

What are some of the challenges of working ‘away from the format of bound scripts’?
That we create fabulous moments out of improvisations but then are left with vignettes, which we need to thread into a structure. And when the structure finally appears we have to let go of hundreds of fabulous moments created because they do not fit into the structure. Having no fixed script keeps actors on their toes during the show and it is exciting, but it also sometimes creates moments that do not work or do not get the desired reaction. But then again, theatre improvised is about failing, failing again, but failing better.

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