‘Mehroon’: A new play about love and longing
A new play by Amitesh Grover speaks of grief and loneliness through the story of a woman who can make clay figurines come alive
Mehroon, a musical on love and longing, has been creating quite a name for itself ever since it opened in Mumbai in November. Directed by Amitesh Grover, who has earlier created The Money Opera—a site-specific project— and written by Sarah Mariam, the play is about insatiable desires, deceit, dreaded curses, and more. The new production is all set to travel to other cities in 2025. In an interview with Lounge, Grover details his process. Edited excerpts.
What was your vision for the play?
It is a musical play about a state of longing. It links inner and outer lives, fantasy and reality, night and day. This play is a lot of things together—a love story, a mystery, a ghost story and a modern folk tale. My vision about love is idealistic and ambitious, and I wanted to make a play that explores its many meanings as well as meaninglessness. The playwright, Sarah Mariam—my long-term collaborator, partner, and writer—mulled over these ideas for months before turning it into a play that inspires, enlightens, and provokes the audience. In her writing, she provides a spiritual treatise on love overcoming the fears of intimacy and loss.
How does the story of Mehroon unfold?
Having lost everything, a grieving woman attempts to start life again with a handful of wet earth and an innate gift to make her creations come alive. The narrative is spun by a chorus of actor-singers, who follow a woman’s journey as she is consumed by her love and desire. This suspenseful tale explores the vagaries of the heart and the implacability of circumstances, and even though it unfolds as a tragedy, it is life-affirming at its core.
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How does the name itself hold the key to understanding the play?
Mehroon, another colloquial word for maroon, was the best title for the play. Like a name, a title gives the work its identity, while simultaneously deriving its meaning from the story. When explaining the difference between the colours red and maroon, a young woman offers an unusual and poetic understanding early on in the play. She says, Laal rang aur mehroon rang mein dekha jaaye toh zyada antar nahin hai. Laal ko gehra kar do, toh mehroon ban jaata hai. Laal rang mein thoda sa kaala andhera dhul jaaye, toh mehroon ban jaata hai. Laal se mehroon ka safar mukhtsar bhi hai magar bahut lamba bhi “ (There isn’t much difference between the colour red and mehroon: Deepen the colour red, and it becomes mehroon; shed a tear on it, it becomes mehroon; throw in the black of darkness, it becomes mehroon. The distance from red to mehroon is both short and long). The significance of these lines becomes clearer as the story progresses, the metaphor in the visual imagery leaves an indelible mark as the story unfolds, turning the meaning of the colour maroon—and of love itself—on its head.
How is Mehroon different from some of your earlier work?
It is a starkly different work from my previous theatre productions, which have been extremely experimental. In Table Radica (2019), I brought food, theatre, and the ritual of eating together in an intimate performance, inviting the audience to sit around a table for the duration of the show. In The Last Poet (2020), I created a virtual three-dimensional city inhabited by characters, who perform live for an online audience. In The Money Opera (2022), an abandoned building was used to create a heterotopic world of performances in which multiple stories unfold simultaneously. All of my works focus on the human experience of grief, of loss, on the political threats faced by writers and artists, on the fragility of memory, and more. With Mehroon, I arrive at the theme of love, and with it, I return to the proscenium and narrative drama.
What was it like working in a musical format?
Directing a musical is both a joy and a challenge. The lyrics of the songs in Mehroon express feelings and thoughts whereas prose seems woefully inadequate to help reveal the hidden layers of drama. The songs come at a pivotal point in the story as scenes plunge into the depths of the human heart, characters are caught unaware of their desires, and when disaster strikes at the end. Only a song composed in Bairagi Bhairav for the last scene could halt the onward march of a catastrophe threatening to sweep all life into death. This experience of expanding time, blending magical realism with an inner quest, allows for unparalleled freedom in musical theatre, something that I enjoyed immensely.
Your work in the past has been deeply political. Mehroon is a play about love. How do the two come together in a piece like this?
If love is deeply personal, it is political as well. To talk about love today is to resist a world characterised by hate, to push against a culture of narcissism and selfishness, and to deny love’s demise in cynical times. In my director’s note on Mehroon, I share 15 questions on love for everyone: When did you first fall in love? When did you last fall in love? Do you fall in love often? Why is everyone so shy about love? Why do we love watching movies on love? What did your father say about love? And your grandmother? Why do poets talk so much about love? Do we fall or rise in love? How far is longing from love?…So on and so forth.
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What inspires you to create work at the moment?
I am intensely self-driven and have rarely needed an external source of inspiration. I love telling stories, being in the theatre, reading script drafts, being in a rehearsal studio with actors, designing and story-boarding scenes, building the mise-en-scène, the sound of the first bell before the show starts, sitting anonymously amidst the audience to watch my show. The creative space I share with my partner, Sarah, is the generative site of many exciting ideas, from where a play, a script, a universe of characters, and relations finally emerge. I’m always ready to concede something to mystery and secretly feel that there is something about life that is unclear. The ordinary, the quotidian is immensely inspiring, from which I build the extraordinary in my work.
Prachi Sibal is a Mumbai-based art and culture writer.
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