Where's My Desi Soulmate?

An Asian play about single people striving to find their other halves? 'Cos, sure, that's not been done before, right? I guess relationships really are all us lot think about, eh?

So no, I was never going into this with high expectations of originality; instead I was hoping to rely on a good script and acting to get my money's worth. Unfortunately Desi Soulmate failed on all this counts (and then some).

I guess the biggest problem was that of energy (or rather a distinct lack of the stuff). The play was slow and punctuated with massive silences, certain scenes went on for way too long and the acting was wooden and confusing. Stage-wise, the set was simple yet versatile, although I felt that video was overused especially on the shabby screens they were projected on. Further technical glitches (one dropped to Windows at one point) further highlighted the amateur quality of the show. I think it turned out a bit too clever for its own good.

There was also a distinct lack of insight; it all had been well trodden and discussed territory (imagine GGM live and you'll come close) and so nothing was fresh. You could probably get more sitting in on one of our infamous local relationship group chats. In a nutshell then, the play wasn't very good.

HOWEVER: there was quite a bit of audience participation during the show, with Cherry Mirza (geddit?) coming down to us often and getting us to talk into her mic. One experiment involved pulling up two random single guys and two random single girls, giving each boy girl pair matching tokens, and then asking them to find each other during the interval. The concept was quite amusing in itself, but perhaps more so considering how I was stitched up and picked as one of the boys.

Alas it took a massive fifteen minutes for my matching girl to to meet me at the stage, under the big floating heart like we were asked to - and even then it was only to get her share of the sweeties were all rewarded with; I didn't even get a name. Still, even with that I managed to do better than the other guy, whose match didn't turn up at all (it turned out later that she was a relatively public figure so perhaps that had something to do with it?).

But it still wasn't over as we were publicly asked during the second part how it all went. The other obviously didn't have much to say except how his date sucked for not turning up. I'll spare you my embarrassment, although needless to say I was, or at least tried to be the perfect gentleman and so didn't release too many non-existent details. I did score massive sympathy points though (and a friend told me later that she overheard people talking about little ol' me in the ladies bathroom. I'm choosing to totally believe this blatant lie).

So yes, that much was pretty fun. The play though was rubbish. Avoid.