Joy Fernandes is on a mission to avenge her mother’s death. Her enemy is a multinational pharmaceutical company that used her mother as a guinea pig for a drug trial without warning her about a probable side-effect, heart failure. Shivani Tibrewala’s The Laboratory looks at how Fernandes, a young doctor, must contend with a scheming uncle, an abusive father, a mentor who, as it turns out, was the mastermind behind the drug trial, and a pharmaceutical company with too much pull to be taken through the motions of a court trial. Writer and director Tibrewala speaks about this medical drama.
Was there a particular incident that influenced the play?
There are a whole lot of stories and issues about medical research that the play attempts to explore. It’s something that happens all the time; people are deceived by pharmaceutical companies that sell drugs over the counter, most of which have dangerous side-effects. I think I got so agitated and angry while researching for the script that I felt I had to put it all in. I spent a good deal of time on research, surfing the web, reading periodicals and medical journals. The most important thing that I had to keep in mind was that I’m a storyteller and not a news channel. For me, the play had to have that human connect. It had to be about somebody I could sympathise with, whose issues and motives I could relate to.
What are some of the themes that are central to the play?
Essentially, the play is about Joy’s relationship with her mother, her father, with her journalist boyfriend, Arjun. It’s about a young girl, her fight, her loss of innocence. It’s also about a mother’s love for her daughter and what it leads her to do. The point is that there are crazy sacrifices that one does commit in the name of love. There are also crazy wars that are fought over greed and also a complete loss of principles, often in the people closest to you. All of this is very hard for Joy to accept. She finds it difficult to believe that the people she really looked up to have fallen as low as they have. It’s a blow that’s very difficult for her to bear.
How have you conceptualised the stage?
At the moment, the format is a reading, a semi-performance. That’s the way we did it at Coimbatore this year when we performed for the Theatre Science Festival and it worked really well because it’s a very intense script with a lot of facts for people to digest. I conferred with my cast and they all felt that if we got into the histrionics, it might actually take away from the content. They said it was like a piece of journalism masquerading as a play. It is almost like an expose. We may do this as a production sometime in the future but for the moment it’s a staged reading. Rosalyn D’Mello
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