A moment from Double Trouble at ITA Machkhowa in Guwahati. Picture by Eastern Projections

A minister wants to have a little caper with the Opposition leader’s secretary, who incidentally happens to be his childhood sweetheart, too. He takes her to a hotel for an all-out pleasure trip under the cover of a nightlong Parliament session — but that is not to be — as they are anything but alone!

Performed by a local cast with great élan, Double Trouble has a hilarious plot that centres on the usual mechanics of a bedroom farce — rapid entries and exits, mistaken identities, deceit and blatant lies, desperate cover-ups and incredible excuses involving some spicy sex escapades of politicians.

An adaptation of Ray Cooney’s comedy Out of Order, Stage Fusion’s Double Trouble, presented last weekend at the ITA Centre, Guwahati, kept every one warmly laughing with its salacious fun on two cold February evenings.

As in a farce, the plot is complicated. Finding himself in “double trouble”, British MP and junior minister Richard Wilson (Uttam Bhattacharjee) summons his trusted principal private secretary George Smith (Bijoy Choudhuri) to bail him out of a potentially scandalous situation.

Richard had invited petite secretary Josephine Taylor (Rupa Hazarika Som) for an afternoon of “fun” at the Westminster Hotel while he is supposed to be attending an all night Commons session in Parliament. He has to cover up his affair with Josephine but then they find a body (Kaushik Barbora) laid across the window sill of their hotel suite. Richard desperately phones his principal private secretary to help him out but the situation grows more and more sticky as they make several botched efforts to hide the body and the affair from the intrusive hotel manager (Deba Choudhury) and a sly and a needy waiter (Manash K. Das) who cleans out the minister’s pockets.

Trouble increases for our minister when his neglected wife Pamela (Mrinmoyee G. Sarma) and his sweetheart’s suspicious husband Ronnie Taylor (Ranjeev Lal Barua) arrive at the hotel.

If that is not enough, the hotel manager Jim Brown unwittingly keeps interrupting the lusty minister’s amorous moves. And the prying waiter Harold Presley certainly doesn’t make things easy for him either. That’s when the politician weaves his cover-up maze of hysterical deceit blatantly lying through his teeth, leaving the audience in splits. The situation becomes knotty when Jane’s lovelorn husband Ronnie meanders from room to room looking for his missing wife.

Not to be outdone, nurse Foster Gladys (Neetali Das) looking after George’s mother, and the hotel maid Maria (Arundhati Kakoti) also land up in the hotel suite to add to the consternation confounded.

The director, Rupa Hazarika Som, did a superb job of guiding her fairly large cast through the complex plot.

Production manager Rathindra Chandra Barua provided a well-constructed elegant and classy set; wardrobe and floor manager Nirmal Bhattacharjee and sound manager Shankardev Choudhury added to the effect.

Som is a very meticulous director, though one wondered what the mime and all the dancing to rock music did to the plot. These episodes made it a musical comedy but added nothing to the comic situation, and unnecessarily impeded the pace of action that is crucial for the climax in any comic plot.

Though the play lost its rhythm at times, the audience never lost its way in the incredible maze of multiple misunderstandings that Double Trouble was all about.

If you enjoy British humour, there is nothing like savouring this heady mix of filth and froth.