When playwright Mahesh Dattani and theatre director Lillete Dubey come together, you often get such memorable plays as Dance Like a Man, On a Muggy Night in Mumbai and 30 Days in September — where stories of human relationships reveal a larger social realism. After a gap of eight years, Dattani and Dubey have joined hands to present Brief Candle, a multilayered play about terminally ill patients in a cancer hospital.

“Mahesh no longer writes plays unless it is commissioned,” says Dubey. “When I approached him to write a story for us last year, he gave me a choice of scripts. Brief Candle caught my attention because of its positive, lively content that had potential for the actors as well as for me,” says Dubey.

Dattani uses the play-within-a-play structure to show patients in a cancer hospital enacting a farce written by another patient who has died of AIDS. “The dead playwright had taken the personal stories of each patient and turned these into exaggerated tales that force everybody to laugh at themselves. The message is that we should make the most of life, even those of us who are not in a hospital,” says Dubey. This is among Dattani’s more complex plays as there is no linear narrative — the action dives from the past to the present to the backstories of each patient to surreal scenes like the one with the dead playwright returning.

At the heart of the play is a love story, but Dubey says Brief Candle demands the audience’s attention. “It is designed to make people think and keep them on their toes,” she says. Despite the air of mortality, the play maintains a light mood through dialogue like “In comedies, nobody dies” and live music by the actors. Brief Candle premiered in Mumbai in July and Dubey has been tweaking the play with every show; the Delhi staging will include a new scene.

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