A story of borrowed lives | Aadyam Theatre's Season 8 play 'Dil Ka Haal Sune Dilwala'

After opening its eighth season with the spooky thriller Ankahi, Aadyam Theatre—an Aditya Birla Group initiative—is ready to stage its second production in Delhi, followed by Mumbai. Dil Ka Haal Sune Dilwala is a playful adaptation of American playwright Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone, infused with music and humour, and reimagined within the pulse and texture of Mumbai.

The play revolves around a struggling actress, Asha Parekh, who answers the phone of a deceased man in a cafe. In doing so, she navigates a darkly comic journey across the city. Amidst live music and memory, Asha’s borrowed identity forces her to stop acting and finally confront her own truth. Mohit Takalkar, who has directed the play, believes that the audience will relate to the idea of connection and how fragile it actually is. “It is a bizarre situation—a woman answering a dead man’s phone and slowly getting pulled into his life. But very quickly, it becomes about something we all recognise. It’s the way we construct versions of ourselves, the way we misread each other and finally the way we try to hold on to people even when we barely know them,” he says.

Ruhl creates a whimsical world with enough elasticity to hold humour, grief, absurdity, even awkwardness all at once. Takalkar believes that in writer Chirag Khandelwal’s version, what will stay with the audience is a mix of humour and ache. “The connection is not just with the story. It’s with the feeling of navigating people, relationships and even ourselves without fully understanding all of it,” he adds.

The director is all praise for the ensemble cast, led by Dilnaz Irani as Asha Parekh, along with Vrajesh Hirjee, Faezah Jalali, Sagar Deshmukh and Bhaskar Sharma. “If someone pushes too hard into comedy or leans too much into emotion, the whole thing tilts. It was about finding a shared rhythm and a certain restraint, trusting that the writing will hold if we don’t overplay it,” he says.

—Dil Ka Haal Sune Dilwala will be staged in Delhi at Kamani Auditorium, on May 16 and 17, and in Mumbai at Bal Gandharva Rang Mandir, on May 30 and 31, and at Nehru Centre on July 25 and 26 cinema