Arjun Kalra (foreground) in Elephant Song | Photo by Fuzzyfigments (Faisal) on instagram
I caught an earlier version of this back at Fringe 2024. It was my first proper introduction to writer-director Kush Shah’s dense and lyrical storytelling. Its intense resonance made quite an impression on me and I’ve been tracking his work ever since. This new version of Elephant Song, presented by Pensive Cat and CinemaClub, is an even richer and more compelling gift. As the piece feels so devotional, and triggered a rare and precious sort of experience for me, it is owed some proper attention in return, and also requires space for an indulgent digression.
In my youth, I remember going through a period of mourning when certain stories had concluded—when I had shared psychic space with characters for whom I felt an acute and specific empathy, camaraderie or sense of wonder. I wanted to stay in their company and it was actually painful to no longer be in their world.
As an adult, there is a lot that I like very much, for a variety of reasons—some sophisticated, others visceral—but this ache and yearning is not so common. When it happens, oh man, I cling pretty tight. Elephant Song puts me in touch with that simultaneously awful and beautiful twinge that comes from a story not being finished with me when final page is flipped, the screen goes black or the lights go down.
b (Arjun Kalra, reprising his role from the Fringe production), has even more fully internalized this character’s tormented, melancholic persona. A Mumbai government worker, he spends his days at a desk, processing death benefits to grieving people for whom he cannot afford the time to engage with his full humanity. There is a potent whiff of Kafkaesque humour in the cruelly absurd bureaucracy he’s trapped within.
b’s late father, big B, Baba (Harsh Prajapati), once held the same job—in the very same chair!—and is now associated, in b’s fraught psyche, with visions of an enigmatic white elephant. Like the teeming masses at his desk, he and his mother, Aai (a funny and affecting performance by Suma Suresh), are still in mourning for a lost father and husband, though their individual coping mechanisms put them at odds. Eventually, we learn how this mystical white elephant figures into their family history, though we feel it throughout, in poetic episodes.
Rohee Uberoi, Ranganathan Rajan & Arjun Kalra in Elephant Song | Photo by Fuzzyfigments (Faisal) on instagram
These visions really explode out onto the stage in this remount, where Shah has collaborated with a movement choreographer (also Suresh) and performers, Rohee Uberoi and Ranganathan Rajan. Like the classical Indian music offered by Utsav Alok (vocals), Kabir Agarwal (synth/background score), Dhruv Sodha (sitar) and Natesh Persaud (tabla/percussion), at the four corners of the stage, the dancers unify b with the forces of myth and culture that frustrate, bolster and haunt him.
This brings some Bollywood style and spectacle, of course, immersing us purposefully into a very specific milieu. But the lyrical and emotive specificity the collaborators achieve is deeper and more astonishing. There is a gestural language here as thoroughly considered as Shah’s loaded text. The ears and curling trunk of an elephant manifest persistently, but there are many other lovely moments that physically articulate aspects of b’s internal world. One of my favourites is when, in the throes of disappointment, they playfully toy with him, coaxing a smile and sending him back out into the busy world.
Kalra’s sensual physicality has intensified since the Fringe production, as has the nuanced expressiveness of his face. There is another moment, when disappointment turns to quietly agonized and inevitable devastation, when his buoyant form goes limp and his face falls with heart-wrenching precision.
An aspect of Shah’s expansion of the story that really touched me is the inclusion of some queer joy amidst b’s rather bleak existence. Shah himself paints a charismatic portrait of K (for Kabir, holding many layers of cultural reference), another cog in the state’s corrupt infrastructure, a police officer, that b encounters on a packed train and becomes a conflicted lover. There is erotic whimsy in their coy flirtation and clever sparring. Each wrestles with their amorphous masculinity, the power dynamics festering there, and the hint of violence present in their mutual vulnerability.
Amongst the more subtle, earnest depictions here, Chirag Motwani—in dual roles as an obnoxious co-worker (A) and a mercenary local pandit—seems a bit of an outlier with his more self-aware, clownish facade. This works in context though, and achieves a distinct honesty of its own, as he emphatically represents the antagonistic forces of government and religion that b is actively defying.
The aesthetic of this remount is similarly minimalist, but Elaf Khan’s set here provides distinct textural details in the clutter of b’s workspace and the earthy fabrics of his bed. A vast background screen provides an ever-changing, colourful backdrop that throws the performers into glorious relief. Together with the costumes, which ground us in a workaday urban Mumbai, Abbey Kruse’s lighting ties this all together with a luminous ebb and flow that intensifies the dream-like atmosphere.
As I’ve come to expect from Shah, this is intimately persuasive on multiple experiential planes—aesthetic, intellectual and emotive. Oh, how I wish for this run to be longer, to have the time to engage with it again, to convince others to, but I am comforted knowing there will be more stories Shah will tell in his intelligent, insightful and stirring manner.
Elephant Song
June 10 to 14, 2026
Native Earth’s Aki Studio
(585 Dundas Street East)
80 minutes
Dhruv Sodha, Ranganathan Rajan & Arjun Kalra in Elephant Song | Photo by Fuzzyfigments (Faisal) on instagram