English
Four friends fall apart when a couple splits up in Donald Margulies’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Dinner with Friends, which has been mildly tweaked for Indian audiences in Feroz Abbas Khan’s production. Perizaad Zorabian and Joy Sengupta play Maya and Vikram, who are forced to question the soundness of their marriage when their best friends Dia (Tisca Chopra) and the unfaithful Harsh (Vinay Jain) file for divorce. The play is a neatly whipped, wryly observed slice of life about relationships that run aground in the shifting sands of middle age.

Dia breaks the news at a sumptuous dinner at Maya and Vikram’s home (Sonya Khan’s sets and elegant costumes effectively communicate the affluence and trendiness of the couples), Harsh is quick to scoot over later and grab dessert and sympathy from Vikram about his wife’s frigidity. But the yawning gap in Harsh and Dia’s relationship starts to fissure their friendship with their happily married pals. Divorce is a sign of failure and betrayal for Vikram and Maya, who feel unmoored and cheated out of their dream of growing old together. The second act rewinds to the dinner when Maya sets up Dia with Harsh and scans forward to the aftermath of the divorce. Harsh and Dia shift from ugly fights to a slow awakening from the dream they bought into based on the marital bliss of their best friends, the golden couple.

In a setting that abounds with the familiar, Margulies perceptively observes the little signs of both harmony and decay in a home – a feat of chemistry ably pulled off by the cast. Sengupta is the sensitive, yielding half, torn between his loyalties to his wife and his best friend. Zorabian pulls out all the stops on being distractingly sexy as the perfectly composed Maya – think well-fitted clothes, an artfully teased mane and a bedtime moisturising ritual. As the alltoo- human Harsh and the artsy ditz Dia, Jain and Chopra convey the firecracker transition from an antsy togetherness to a postseparation blossoming of their individual lives. The small, telling details in Dinner with Friends will have mature audience members nod, grunt and chortle in parts.