Recasting Tagore

My review of the play Her Letters: Qissa Kothi's Hindi adaptation of Tagore's story 'Streer Patra'

Indian artists tend to treat the celebrated work of Rabindranath Tagore with kid gloves. But in adapting the master's 1914 Bengali short story Streer Patra, the Mumbai-based collective Qissa Kothi has taken a bold, and mostly successful, approach.

Tagore's tale is a first-person narrative, framed as a letter in which a woman explains, with quiet resolve, why she has left home. But in playwright-director Sharmistha Saha's able hands, it becomes an intense two-person performance in Hindi, Her Letters, which comes to Mumbai's Kala Ghoda Festival on February 5 after performances in New Delhi last month.

"To Thine Auspicious Lotus Feet", Mrinal's letter begins, marking the abyss of inequality between an Indian wife and her husband. Few women would use such an expression today. But even a century later, candour and reflectiveness like Mrinal's rarely emerge from the confines of a marriage. For her marital household, she was only Mejo Bou, 'Middle Daughter-in-law', a label she cannot squeeze herself into any longer. It's taken 15 years, writes Mrinal, but she has finally realised that she has other relationships: "with the world and the World-Keeper".

The terrifying familiarity of Mrinal's epiphany says everything about why 'Streer Patra' still works. No man's path to selfhood has ever been dependent on his marital status. But wifehood still defines women -- enshrined in religious ideology, in social behaviour, in our very language. Think of the Hindi word suhaag, for instance. The state of being married is ostensibly neutral, but really only implicates women. A man's body, like his mind, need never be marked by marriage: no bindi, sindoor, mangalsutra or kangans. There is no male equivalent of the category 'suhaagan'.

That category takes unspoken centre stage here, politically and aesthetically. Markers of suhaag, a tulsi plant, a gota-edged dupatta, a red bangle -- dominate the stage design. The atmosphere is redolent with the sights and smells of traditional Hindu domesticity, its sensory excess deliberately suffocating. A brass diya is lit and blown out; marigolds are crushed in a closed fist; spices are ground on a stone. Actors Manisha Mondal and Bharati Perwani wear the richest of crimson saris, using their yards of silken sheen alternately to suggest unravelling and bondage, eroticism and blood.

Given the reverence with which Tagore is treated, Saha's confident adaptation is noteworthy. She leaves out lines, weaves in the voices of Virginia Woolf and Amrita Pritam, and calls the play Her Letters rather than 'The Wife's Letter'. But its animating force remains the unnamed, unnameable relationship between Mrinal and Bindu, a young girl she takes under her wing and who, in turn, adores her. As in Tagore's tale, Mrinal's husband remains a distant cipher. The greatest irony of all this wifeliness is how little her husband has touched her soul.

Published in India Today, 3 Feb 2018.

Manly Women, Womanly Men

My Mirror column, on Akshayambara and Harikatha Prasanga:

A new play and a new film step into the world of Yakshagana performers to sharpen our sense of what it means to be a man — or a woman.

A still from Sharanya Ramprakash's play Akshayambara

The seated figure, stage right, is in the middle of buttoning a blouse over a patently false bosom. It is a tightly fitted sari blouse, closing laboriously over the hardness of the fake breasts, and yet transforming them before our eyes into an imagined curvaceousness. Still, when the man – for of course it is a man who turns this intimate act into something so frontal, so prosaic – stands up, what draws the eye is the line of hair that runs down his muscled torso, between where the blouse ends and the petticoat begins.

But then he covers himself with more of the paraphernalia of femininity: the twinkling nose ornament, the brilliant green sari swirling, the long thick plait that snakes down to the waist, the girdle that circles it. And lo and behold, we have before us Draupadi — on the morning of her swayamvara, picking flowers from her father's garden to weave into a veni for her hair. We are enchanted, thinking about how the humming Kshatriya princess is just another girl. Then our performer ambles back into his corner, hoists up his gorgeous sari and pisses – standing, like a man. Just as swiftly as the spell was cast, it is broken. The audience breaks into laughter.

The scenes above are part of Sharanya Ramprakash's remarkable Kannada play Akshayambara, staged in Delhi during the National School of Drama's annual theatre festival last week. Ramprakash is a Bengaluru-based theatre practitioner who started exploring the traditional folk form of Yakshagana with the Udupi-based Guru Bannanje Sanjeeva Suvarna after receiving an Inlaks fellowship in 2013. Akshayambara, which emerged out of this interaction and won Ramprasad the Best Original Script META award last year, casts long-time Yakshagana performer Prasad Cherkady (who won at META for Best Male Performance) in the role of a male actor who plays Draupadi. The play deals with his response to the arrival of a female actor (Ramprakash herself) who has been cast in the role of Kaurava (Duryodhana).

Performing in public has been socially stigmatised for women in South Asia. So most traditional dramatic forms, from Ramleela in the north to Yakshagana in the south, have a long history of men who play popular female roles. In the Kannada cultural sphere, the female impersonator of Yakshagana has clearly emerged as a lens through which gender and performance -- and gender as performance – can be thought about.

Akshayambara pushes Yakshagana's seeming embrace of cross-dressing to its political limits by bringing in a woman. When it is a woman who takes on a male role, the play asks, why does that seem to shake the traditional structure? Ananya Kasaravalli's debut feature film Harikatha Prasanga (Chronicles of Hari), itself based on a short story by Gopalakrishna Pai, approaches the same subject from a different angle.

Akshayambara needed to bring in a (biologically) female actor to push the man-acting-as-a-woman to actually encounter his vulnerability. Harikatha, in contrast, gives us a male protagonist who is vulnerable because his performative engagement with femininity has transcended the stage.

A still from Ananya Kasaravalli's film Harikatha Prasanga

What makes someone or something feminine is a recurring question here, too. The one time Hari (an affecting Shrunga Vasudevan) tries out a more vigorous style on stage, his jumping attracts his guru's ire as signifying the 'masculine'. “What kind of dance is that? When you act like a woman, you should make your gestures like a woman.”

Hari complies on stage. But soon he finds it harder and harder to persuade others – and soon, himself – of his masculinity off-stage. A proposed wedding falls through because a seasonal Yakshagana performer does not fulfil the traditional masculine role of breadwinner. He goes to see a sex worker, only to be distressed by her charmed reiteration of what she sees as his feminine softness. Gradually, he finds himself adopting female garb daily: a long skirt, and later a sari. Again, like with Akshayambara, we encounter the question of what makes up femininity: soft hands, long hair, feminine clothes?

While challenging us to think about what femininity and masculinity mean, Kasaravalli's film occasionally compresses both into stereotypes — and deliberately lets the moments ring out, waiting to watch if they will resonate. “[Women] need women to share agony with, and men for pleasure,” says a woman who has come to watch Hari act. Akshayambara moves more in the direction of an essential selfhood: “You can never be disrobed,” says the woman to the man.

What makes a man a man? Or a woman a woman? Is it about who struts and who mocks? Who performs, who applauds? Who deflates, who builds up? Who steps back? Must vulnerability be identified with the feminine? Both play and film, happily, do not provide pat answers. It is enough that they ask the question at all.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19 February 2017.

Theatre: The Winter's Tale

Two theatre directors add a bit of sparkle (and some masala) to a Shakespearean gem.



When Anirudh Nair first approached Neel Chaudhuri two years ago with the idea that they direct a play together, they didn’t know the collaboration was going to lead them to The Winter’s Tale. Or even Shakespeare. Having cut his teeth on ShakeSoc (as the St. Stephen’s College theatre society refers to itself), Chaudhuri admits, may have dulled his enthusiasm for Shakespeare -- or at least “the myopic reverence that seems to colour everyone's attitudes towards studying and performing Shakespeare”. In any case, says Chaudhuri, he was “dying to work on a Chekhov text”.

The desire to work with a straight-up classic was something new for Chaudhuri. As he put it himself, his trajectory as a playwright and director until now “seems to have studiously avoided any affinity for classical modes of drama and performance”. From the improvised vignettes of Positions (2006) to the rather adventurous Mouse (2008), an unsettling interaction between an ‘actor’ and a ‘director’ which unfolded at least partially in the dark, via the thoroughly remarkable A Brief History of the Pantomimes (2008), right down to the superbly realized Taramandal (2010) (which won the Hindu Metroplus award for playwriting), Neel Chaudhuri’s plays have been about storytelling with a certain economy. Even when the dialogue is absolutely crucial, the dominant sensation you take away from his productions is one of quiet. And even when his starting point has been a well-known text – in Ich bin Fassbinder (2011) it was Fassbinder’s epochal film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, in Taramandal it was Satyajit Ray’s short story about thwarted ambition, ‘Patol Babu, Film Star’ – Chaudhuri’s way has been to push at its edges, or to create narrative echoes for it, never simply to take the text as is.

Nair, on the other hand, has been working a lot with Shakespeare over the past four or five years – on using physical theatre in Shakespeare and also studying original practice (working with the specificities of Shakespearean rhythms, pentameter, how to use the punctuation, and so on). Nair’s Wide Aisle Productions has also been working on a project that takes Shakespeare to schools, and many of the actors who’re part of that project are also part of the Tadpole Repertory. Tadpole, founded in 2009, is a loose confederation of talented actors in concert with whom Chaudhuri has produced pretty much all his plays.

Chaudhuri was excited about what he and the Tadpole actors could learn from incorporating Nair’s physical training and gesture work. So Shakespeare it was. The group decided they wanted a play that had possibilities as an ensemble piece, not centred heavily around one or two characters – this eliminated, for instance, Hamlet and Othello – and something that Indian theatre-goers weren’t likely to be familiar with – this meant Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, King Lear and The Merchant of Venice were all out. From a shortlist that included The Taming of the Shrew and Pericles, the final choice was The Winter’s Tale.

One of Shakespeare’s later works, the play is split into two: the first half is a tragic tale of jealousy that unfolds in the court of King Leontes of Sicilia, while the second, which opens 16 years later in the kingdom of Bohemia, is exuberant in both its comedy and its romance. “The duality was both beguiling and bewildering,” says Chaudhuri. “It struck us as quite unique – court and country, tragedy and comedy, death and restoration, tyranny and abandonment. After a point it seemed really clear to us that it was a play ripe for all our ambitions.” The production that unfolded amid the astonishingly apt lily ponds and landscaped grassy mounds of Zorba the Buddha in Delhi this March certainly realized those ambitions. The cast moved with marvelous felicity -- from one part of the open-air venue to another, between the play’s inherent binaries, and most admirably, from a never-stiff Shakespearian English to a glorious, mobile Hindustani.

The confidence of that linguistic decision lies at the root of what is most striking about the play. It plays off the duality that already exists, and creates new ones. Tanzil Ahmad’s superb translation is finely attuned to changes of register in the original, recreating both high and low – and within the low, shifting between “the playfully exaggerated, the bawdy and the mundane”. So the trickster Autolycus’s aside to the audience, “If the springe hold, the cock’s mine!” becomes “Idhar phanda laga, udhar murga phansa!!”; the Clown’s exclamation, “I’ the name of me—” becomes “Arre teri!”. There is even room for the occasional Hinglish moment, without it turning into a fetish or a quirk. And whether they are speaking in English or Hindustani, the actors successfully inhabit the dialogue, bringing to their speech the individual accents and styles that come naturally to them.

Despite what anyone might tell you, Shakespearean language takes a while to get used to. And yet when your ear accepts it, it can be more poetic and brilliant than anything you imagined. Nair and Chaudhuri’s production provides the wonderful sense of being at home, both in the language of Shakespeare and in a language a lot of us know but no longer really speak. This is a production that is both absolutely universal and yet utterly located in the here and now of 2013 India. There is something remarkable going on here. As Leontes says at the end of the play, “If this be magic, let it be an art/ Lawful as eating.”

Published in the April-May issue of Le City Deluxe, an international luxury lifestyle magazine that has recently launched in India (and was kind enough to want to publish a theatre-related piece).

A Report on the 14th Bharat Rang Mahotsav

A still from Insha ka Intezaar, a Pakistani adaptation of Waiting for Godot

This year’s festival of theatre at the National School of Drama (NSD), the 14^th Bharat Rang Mahotsav, staged 88 plays in total, including 14 productions that commemorated Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary. Within India, while English, Hindi, Bengali and Marathi were as usual better represented than other languages, there were productions to be seen in Tamil, Malayalam, Manipuri, Kannada, Kashmiri, Mizo and Tulu, as well as several non-verbal performances. The international round-up included plays from South Africa (Inkosazana, a lively collaboration between the University of Cape Town and fellowship students from the NSD), Nepal (a solo performance of Sara Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis), Afghanistan (an adaptation of The Little Prince in Dari) China (Peking Opera), the United Kingdom (Roland Schimmelpfennig’s The Golden Dragon) and three productions from Poland (among them Pawel Demirski’s In the Name of Jakub S., Marta Gornicka’s Chorus of Women).

Given the enormous number of plays staged (often clashing with each other), it is impossible to watch more than a small fraction of what is on offer. Of necessity, therefore, what follows is a fairly committed theatregoer’s idiosyncratic report on the plays she did manage to watch (and found interesting).

Among the highlights of this year’s plays was the marvellously energetic Nain Nachaiya, an adaptation of Tirumalnath Aiyulnath’s Sanskrit play Prahasan Kuhuna Bhaikshav directed by Farid Bazmi and performed by Rang Vidushak, Bhopal. Founded in 1984 by the legendary Bansi Kaul, Rang Vidushak describes itself as a “laboratory for clown-theatre”, a space from which to explore the power of laughter. Nain Nachaiya is a classic comedy of mistaken identities and temporary amnesia: the central narrative involves one Bedhang Prasad, who has lost his memory and wanders the kingdom as a faux-yogi called Baba Ghotalu, is eventually restored to his wife, the redoubtable Sawaniya. But as befits a theatre troupe whose work is based on “principles taken from the performing and non-performing art-forms, on indigenous sports, childhood games, rhymes and riddles, the lilt of dialects, the ballads of minstrels, the toughness of akhadebaazi and the flexibility of natgiri”, Nain Nachaiya manages to take an ancient Sanskrit text and make of it something brilliantly entertaining, embedded in the here-and-now by the sharpness of its wit. 

From the self-obsessed king who is himself no less than a vidushak (played brilliantly by Harsh Daand in a style that reminded me of Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne) to the aphorism-coining Baba Ghotalu (a superb Uday Shahane, who delivers such wondrous lines as “Khone aur paane mein kitna sookshm antar hai” or “Nrityam Sharanam Gacchaami” with the enjoyment they deserve), the actors anchor the play’s easy laughter in something deeper. Bansi Kaul’s vibrant set and costumes make the production glorious to look at, and the spectacular set pieces are all performed with aplomb: the jester on stilts, king’s men who do acrobatic stunts with lathis, and my favourite scene: a giant humanoid parrot hovering behind pillars to announce at key moments in a conversation, “Jhooth hai!”.

Like Nain Nachaiya in terms of drawing on folk traditions of performance and storytelling was Molagaapodi (Chilli Powder), a Tamil production based on a novel called Karukku (1992) by the magisterial Dalit writer Bama and directed by debutante director Srijith Sundaram. The women, men and transgender actors who make up the group, Kattiyyakkari (Storyteller) see theatre as an artistic tool to speak up against oppressive structures. The tale of the war between the poor labourer Pachiamma and the rich and stingy Gangamma is enacted with a raw, often bawdy physicality that thrives on exaggerated thrusts and fake beatings. 

It is a young group, and the production is nowhere near as well-appointed or perfectly-tuned as Rang Vidushak’s, but they do a brilliant job with minimal sets, like a sheet with a square cut out of it to create an image of Gangamma at her mansion window. There is true tragedy here, poverty and prejudice and violence as it is lived every minute of every day by so many desperate people in this country. But the play, thankfully, steers clear of the maudlin. Instead, it uses mime and chanting and dance to create a vivid portrait of anger leavened with laughter. The actors’ delivery of dialogues needs work, but there is an irrepressible energy, an innate sense of rhythm that makes up for the moments it goes off-key.

A still from the Tamil play Molagaapodi

The reason I could understand as much I did of Molagaapodi, despite knowing no Tamil, is that the festival now provides an English translation of the dialogue of all plays not in Hindi or English. The translated dialogue runs as supertitles on a screen placed either above the stage (as in Kamani Auditorium), or to the side (as in LTG or Shriram Centre). While the supertitles may not catch matters of dialect or accent or register, it is a wonderful thing to be able to have plays in Polish or Kannada or Mizo attract a substantial audience of non-native speakers.

Emboldened by the supertitles, I watched two Marathi plays this year. They couldn’t have been more different. The first was Gajab Kahani, based on Jose Saramago’s posthumously published novel The Elephant’s Journey. The story is set in 1553. Solomon the elephant, a gift to King Dom Joao III from one of his colonies in India, has been languishing in Lisbon for two years, along with his mahout Subhro, when the Portuguese king decides to dispatch Solomon to Vienna as a gift for the Habsburg ruler. Solomon and Subhro proceed through unfamiliar landscapes, with people everywhere projecting their own agendas and desires onto this previously unseen creature. Beautifully designed and directed by Mohit Takalkar, Gajab Kahani unfolds at the thoughtful, deliberate pace required of Saramago’s wise and tender tale. Aasakta Kalamanch’s actors are very good, especially Geetanjali Kulkarni, who manages the remarkable feat of transforming herself into Solomon, body and soul.

Oddly, the other Marathi production I saw also had actors playing animals. Originally written in Hindi several years ago, Sai Paranjpye’s recently revived Jaswandi is a “cat’s eye of humans”. A hugely popular play with 100 runs to its credit, it tells the rather cliched tale of a neglected housewife who finds herself getting involved with a man ten years her junior. There are some good performances: Swati Bowalekar as the maid Rangabai and Rajesh Kamble as the scheming driver Tanpure.But what saves the play from dreary predictability are the ‘cats’: two mangy strays adopted by Sonia. As in Gajab Kahani, the play uses the imagined perspective of animals as a way to comment on the foibles of humans.

Among the other interesting Indian plays was Lal Baksho (The Red Box), a production created through a workshop by Sohag Sen. The play unfolds as a series of episodes, each revolving around the presence of a red box – in a park, by the roadside, in a train, on a TV serial set. Each playlet is beautifully conceived and the actors are uniformly excellent, perfectly evoking the different characters and their variously splintered relationships within the necessarily brief time they have on stage. But the play doesn’t quite come together, because the notion of terror – ostensibly the theme that unites the various episodes – does not emerge clearly enough. It is only in the episode on the train (where the passengers reveal their deep-seated prejudices when confronted with a need for someone to blame) that the play engages with the dangers of the popular discourse on terror. The rest of the time, the presence of the red box merely draws out the tensions already inherent within a group or in a relationship (and in the last two episodes, it doesn’t even really do that). I think the play would have been better served by not being forced under the ‘terror’ rubric, setting it free to explore the breakdown of relationships and even civility, not as the byproduct of terror but as a subject in itself.

A very different – absurdist – take on contemporary politics came from the Tehreek-i-Niswan production Insha ka Intezar, which managed to adapt Beckett’s Waiting for Godot into a play sharply located in the Pakistani milieu, making two of its integral characters women and turning Pozzo of the original play into a mock-military figure called Mansha, a self-important man in a khaki vardi who is thrilled with the sound of his own voice. He speaks constantly, yet never answers a question that is put to him. Like a Pakistani dictator, Mansha refuses to sit down without being invited to. The world of Insha ka Intezar, in which people see a dried-up tree and think, “Chalo, ise toh nijad mil gayi”, in which people have been waiting for so long that no-one can remember what they were waiting for, is a scathing comment on contemporary Pakistan.

Among other productions from abroad, Ramin Gray’s production of Roland Schimmelpfennig’s play The Golden Dragon was an extremely unusual one, where a group of six actors switched mannerisms, gaits, and very occasionally, costumes, to create a theatrical fable about migration, set in and around a Chinese takeaway somewhere in Britain. The production is memorable because it forces us to confront its own fictitiousness at every moment. The actors provide spoken introductions to their own characters, interrupting the smooth flow of the narrative and highlighting the construction of the theatrical in true Brechtian fashion.

A still from Chorus of Women

The Chorus of Women, a modern-day tragic chorus of women from Poland, was another innovative and arresting experience. Formed through an open casting call in 2009, the chorus contains 28 women of all ages and experiences and all variety of acting backgrounds. They speak in unison and yet in a multitude of voices, alternately happy, hungry, sad, angry, sexy, tired, argumentative. They give voice to forgotten songs, they work with advertising slogans to produce witty routines (“Grate, chop, squeeze” rising to a crescendo), they retell fairy stories. Sung, shouted, whispered or chanted, the gift of the women’s chorus is to bring a million fragments together in a reimagining of the collective voice. The least conventionally theatrical performance of all – no costumes, no sets, no characters, certainly no plot – was in many ways a necessary reminder that theatre is not constituted by any of these things. All it needs is for us to see and hear. And be moved to think.

(Written for the Feb 2012 issue of Avantika, a Kolkata-based magazine of the performing arts.)

Musical Vowels, Staged Consonants: Stories in a Song

My review of Sunil Shanbag's marvellous play, published in the new Kolkata-based performing arts magazine, Avantika.

We’re used to thinking of music as an aid to theatre, something that underscores the mood of a dramatic performance, perhaps even alters it. But Sunil Shanbag’s new production uses theatrical performance as a route into the multiple worlds of Indian music. It is a reversal without precedent, at least in India. The result of an enormously productive artistic collaboration between Shanbag and musicians Shubha Mudgal and Anish Pradhan, Stories in a Song makes for scintillating theatre. Shanbag has long been invested in the theatrical tradition of live music – in 2007 he staged a musical adaptation of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera at the Prithvi Festival with 16 songs – but the idea of telling stories of music through theatre came from Mudgal, who also did the research and composed or selected the music together with Pradhan.

Stories in a Song is unusual because it is neither a single narrative, nor even a collection of interconnected vignettes. It plays out as a series of dramatised anecdotes, unconnected to each other, but for the fact that each brings to life a specific moment in what we might call the social history of music.

The first of these ‘moments’ is the least fleshed out. The women on stage chanting in Pali are meant to represent the Elder Nuns, the Theri, who gave their name to the Therigatha, a collection of short poems recited by early members of the Buddhist Sangha around 600 BC. We are informed that the Therigatha is the earliest collection of women’s literature. But the performance doesn’t give us a sense of the content of the verses, apparently composed in the voices of women dealing with individual yet deeply universal experiences: the song of a mother whose child has died, the song of a prostitute who becomes a nun, or that of a wealthy woman who abandons her once-luxurious life.

From a musical experience bound up with faith, self-realization and withdrawal from the material world, we leap into the very worldly space of a kotha in early 20th century Banaras. Adapted from Amritlal Nagar’s story 'Yeh Kothewaliyan' by Aslam Pervez, this second segment of the play tells of an encounter between Gandhi and the tawaifs of Banaras. A famed courtesan’s musical performance is interrupted by social reformers who think of tawaifs and their music as morally reprehensible. She puts up a spirited fight, but the tawaif community is increasingly beleaguered by rising middle class morality. Until Mahatma Gandhi himself makes a public statement to the effect that no profession should be condemned if it is practiced honestly. The grateful tawaifs continue to sing, gladly adding patriotic songs to their repertoires.

The next episode is called ‘Chandni Begum’. Ashok Mishra’s adaptation draws on Qurratulain Haider’s Lucknow-set novel of the same name to bring to life a family of folk performers who are attempting to survive in a world without nawabi patronage. It’s a snapshot which somehow succeeds in not feeling hurried. It is also remarkable for the acuteness with which it juggles parallel emotional tracks. Our introduction to Mogrey Master, his wife Chandbeli Begum, their comedian son (“mendhakon ki ladai ki asli awaaz nikaal kar dil jeet letein hai”) and daughter Bela “singer and poetess” may be outwardly comic, but the narrative is tinged with an urgent despair that manages to communicate itself perfectly despite our laughter: in Nishi Doshi’s poised performance, we see Bela’s use of her beauty as both crutch and object of barter, her quiet but rising desperation.

A woman is at the forefront of the next piece, too, but here the register is very different indeed. From the nuanced, literary evocativeness of Qurratulain Haider we jump into the broad folksy humour and energetic physicality of nautanki: an excerpt from Bahadur Ladki (The Brave Girl), credited to the legendary nautanki performer Gulab Bai (b. 1926). The Great Gulab Theatrical Company, which she founded in 1955, still tours the Hindi heartland with its famous nautanki productions. Set in colonial India, this piece focuses on a courageous young village girl who stands up to a lecherous English officer. The heroine is brave and virtuous, the villain is ridiculously villainous. There is little space here for nuance – but the pleasure is in the feisty, joyful recreation of a largely rural theatrical form by a cast of metropolitan actors (especially the marvellous Ketaki Thatte) without a hint of condescension.

The theme of women making music is taken up again in the memorable ‘Hindustani Airs’. The cross-cultural encounter here is also profoundly colonial, but more recognizable for a contemporary audience. Written by Vikram Phukan, it presents a fictional meeting between a Lady Isabella Hardinge who wishes to collect and transcribe what she calls ‘Hindustani airs’, and sends for an accomplished tawaif called Khanum Jaan to sing for her, so she might pick up the essence of the melodies – and put them down on paper. Piya Sukanya plays the memsahib as harmless but oblivious: to her gracious guest’s social and economic status (she wonders about her sleeping on the floor, while the tawaif chuckles to herself, thinking of her luxurious quarters), to the spontaneous innovative interpretation of the melody by the singer that makes Indian music what it is, and most of all, to Khanum Jaan’s increasing sense that she is talking to a fool. But what is charming about the piece is that Phukan refuses to close on a negative note: even as the long-suffering Khanum (the charming Mansi Multani) winks and nudges the willing audience easily onto her side of things, a window is left open for us to see how the abyss of otherness might be bridged in a moment.

The next piece, ‘Whose Music Is It?’, also written by Phukan, tracks the journey of a song through different musical worlds in India: from the guru-shishya parampara to the commercial studio, with the versatile Ketaki Thatte transforming effortlessly from ‘Bahadur Ladki’ to a hesitant classical music shishyaa. The piece is enjoyable enough, but stays at the level of caricature.

The glorious final segment, however, more than compensates. Drawing on Dr. Arjundas Kesri’s Kajri Mirjapur Sarnaam, it recreates what’s called a kajri dangal: a competition where the different kajri akhadas, or schools of kajri singing, battle it out for top honours in kajri writing and singing. Here, as in ‘Bahadur Ladki’, Namit Das walks away with the applause. There it is his evil afsar singing nautanki lyrics Angrezi-style, here it is the reverse: his rendition of a kajri in English.

In fact, Shanbag’s cast of actors is uniformly excellent. What is even more astounding is the passion and interpretive wit they bring to each of the musical renditions: from the bandish performed by the guru in ‘Whose Music’ to Pia Sukanya’s operatic aria in ‘Hindustani Airs’, each piece is performed in a superbly expressive way – ironically, a feat that most musicians may not be able to emulate.

The anecdote, as every rasik knows, is the most popular way in which the knowledge of and love for Hindustani music is passed on. Sheila Dhar’s brilliant Raga’n Josh: Stories from a Musical Life (2005) took a lot of the best stories she had told and retold over the years and immortalised them in prose: from Siddheshwari Bai’s impromptu rendition of the English ‘My love is a little bird’ in thumri style at the advent of the British Chief Commissioner to Bhimsen Joshi’s imagined performance of Malkaus at the Harballabh festival. The anecdotes brought to life by Stories in a Song manage to achieve a similar richness and communicative power. May the shows never end.

WHY INDIAN THEATRE NEEDS META

A still from Akvarious Productions' The Interview

It’s garnered immense goodwill over the years among the theatre fraternity. But what has the Mahindra Theatre Festival actually achieved? TRISHA GUPTA finds out

AMONG THE PLAYS showcased at the sixth Mahindra Theatre Festival, just held in Delhi, was a production in English called Dancing on Glass. Written and directed by Ram Ganesh Kamatham, Dancing... is a scathing take on the IT world in Bengaluru. It also contains what the festival website describes as “some explicit language”. A few months ago, Kamatham’s play caught the eye of The Guardian’s theatre blog. Having excitedly described its expletive-laden dialogue as “drawing gasps” from Delhi’s Habitat Centre audience, the blog went on to heap praises on Kamatham for placing a “darker and angrier vision of India on stage” than is done “in the West and by its own film industry”.

Much might be said for the play’s brutal energy and unabashed language. But The Guardian blogger hangs his appreciation on the idea that in “a cultural climate dominated by escapist Bollywood narratives [and] song-and-dance routine[s]... realism can be every bit as shocking as the swearing.” The lazy, catch-all Bollywood bashing apart, this is precisely the sort of polemical argument that often gets made about theatre in India — sometimes, sadly, by theatrewalas themselves. But it is a tiresome and inaccurate stance, one that only does disservice to the thing it wants to promote — because while realist, outspoken, angry, unmusical plays are part of the contemporary Indian theatre scene, there are as many that are fantastical or myth-inspired, tender, thoughtful or riotously musical. The brilliance of Indian theatre — if such a thing can be assumed — lies in its capaciousness.

It is this capacious spirit that the Mahindra Theatre Festival, instituted in 2006 in conjunction with the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards (META), seeks to embody. Plays staged have ranged from marvellous amalgams of literature, dance and music like Sangit Giribala (2008), Chetan Datar’s Marathi production based on Tagore’s short story Manabhanjan, to the affecting mime play Mirel Masingkha from Manipur, which won awards for Best Original Script and Best Sound Design in 2010. Plays that apply can be non-verbal and can include physical theatre, puppetry, multimedia and dance. Sanjoy Roy of Teamwork Films, whose team has been organising META since its inception, remembers an entry from Odisha last year that was taken from village to village by bicycle. While it didn’t make the final shortlist, the instance reveals an organisational vision inclusive and egalitarian enough to pit a practically unknown production from Kerala against a Girish Karnad play. After the inaugural year, when competing plays were first divided into “established” and “emerging” theatre, META has also done away with the seniority-based hierarchy that leads to competitions being limited to playwrights or directors under a certain age — like Mumbai’s Thespo. “The sifting process tries to showcase the best theatre and largely it succeeds,” says Mahesh Elkunchwar, Marathi playwright and META jury member for 2011.

META’s “sifting process” is also unusual. Unlike most theatre festivals, including the National School of Drama’s (NSD) Bharat Rang Mahotsav in Delhi, the Prithvi Festival in Mumbai, or the Ranga Shankara Festival in Bengaluru, it is not based on invitations. “We started in 2006 by asking our selectors to send their recommendations, but since then, it’s been a democratic process, where any group can apply,” says Roy. Ten productions are shortlisted from hundreds of DVD recordings by a committee of theatre experts to perform at the festival in Delhi, where they are viewed by the public and by a special jury. Plays compete for honours in 13 categories, from Stage Design to Best Ensemble.

OF COURSE, not having a ‘quota system’ that ensures equitable regional representation means that states and cities with a thriving theatre scene send in more entries and are likely to get more plays in. Over the past six years, Kerala, Assam and Manipur have all been regularly represented, as have Meghalaya, Delhi, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. The most consistently successful state, though, is Maharashtra, with plays from Mumbai and Pune often dominating the festival. The 2011 selection was particularly skewed, with five productions from Mumbai and two from Pune. “With seven plays from Maharashtra, people were joking the festival this year should be held in Mumbai,” laughs Mumbai-based director Akarsh Khurana, whose dark satire The Interview is one of the seven. “But really, Mumbai audiences have had a chance to see them, so it’s great that it’s in Delhi.”

Maharashtra’s dominance at the META awards is perhaps not surprising. Apart from having successful commercial theatre in Marathi and Gujarati (and in Hindi and English, if in lesser numbers), Maharashtra regularly holds districtand state-level theatre competitions with state-sponsored awards. Though some other state governments like West Bengal and Manipur do give away theatre awards, as do corporations and smaller bodies devoted to the arts in some states, recognition and financial support for theatre in India is less than negligible. “Normally theatrepeople live in penury,” says Elkunchwar matterof- factly. In the contemporary Indian scenario, where non-commercial theatre survives largely as a labour of love, the power of the financial reward cannot be underestimated. Though the sums are by no means large if you place them in the context of the contemporary cost of living in urban India — Best Production gets Rs. 1 lakh, Best Original Playwright, Rs. 75,000, and the 11 other awards Rs. 35,000 each — the money is a bounty for most Indian practitioners. “META is the only thing that has given the experimental theatrewala some money,” says a grateful Manav Kaul, whose remarkable plays have won awards almost every year.

FOR LESSER-KNOWN groups, it is the prestige of competing at the national level that makes META a lifealtering experience. The excitement of performing to a full house at Delhi’s Kamani or Shri Ram Center auditorium is palpable, especially in those who do not work in urban metropolitan contexts — even if, like Bidyawati Phukan, director of last year’s award-winning Guti Phulor Gamosa, their performances regularly gather crowds of thousands. Phukan, whose group UTSA lives and works out of Namaithang, a village near Assam’s border with Arunachal, remembers the META experience warmly. “It was wonderful to meet other groups, and people like Boman Irani and MS Sathyu. And the awards inspired our group to work harder.” For Dr Yumnam Sadananda Singh of Manipur’s Kanglei Mime Theatre Company, META brought rare exposure. “We were invited to the NSD festival in January. It was packed. Many couldn’t get tickets. Now we are doing shows in Kolkata and Kerala.”

In great measure, the immense tide of goodwill generated by META and the Mahindra festival over the past six years is an index of how starved theatre, like the arts in India in general, is for both funding and recognition. “Any form of support for theatre can only be lauded,” says Neelam Mansingh Chowdhury, who runs the critically-acclaimed Chandigarh- based theatre group The Company and is a META jury member for 2011. Theatrepeople seem almost resigned to the fact that there is little space for critical (or any) coverage of theatre in a media culture so dominated by popular cinema. “There seems even less coverage than 10 years ago,” muses Mansingh. “But the play in the context of the festival gets covered at least.” “Theatre may or may not draw large audiences, may not have any visible returns in terms of a spotlight on the sponsors,” concurs Anuradha Kapur, director of NSD and co-jury member. But while most theatrepeople are deeply grateful for the existence of a META, it is far from filling the enormous and urgent need that exists. “There is absolutely no reason to be apologetic in demanding State support,” says Kapur. “The world’s best, most cutting-edge theatre, German or British, subsists on State funding.” Sanjoy Roy points out that the arts in India function despite — not because of — government policies. “It is not handing out money for charity, but an investment in the wealth of the nation, in creativity. And creative arts like theatre also provide a platform for the discontented voice: we see it in plays from the Northeast every year.” Clearly there is a great deal more that needs to be done, and no shortage of ideas about directions from which change can come. And almost every theatreperson you ask has tens of them — taking theatre festivals to smaller towns, instituting permanent repertory companies that might afford a viable livelihood to theatre practitioners, building affordable theatres in every Indian city. What makes META special is that it has had the gumption to go beyond the small-scale ambitions with which theatre in this country is taught to be content. Perhaps what is needed is to think even bigger. Arundhati Nag, 2011 jury member and founder of Bengaluru’s remarkable theatre hub, Ranga Shankara, is not being facetious when she says corporates have a duty to patronise theatre: “Earlier, you had kings, now you have corporations. Why should there be an IPL only in cricket? Why not in theatre?”

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 8, Issue 11, Dated 19 Mar 2011

Theatre Review: Nati Binodini

Nati Binodini is an ambitious play. It aims at being much more than a biography of the nineteenth-century Bengali prostitute who achieved almost mythical renown as a stage actress. It sets out to tell a story about modern Indian theatre, to expose the intimate yet exploitative relationship that actresses have had with the stage, and to probe the nature of acting itself.

As a line in the play has it, “Abhinaya swayam ko jaanne ki ek kriya hai, par aisa abhyas karna bahut kathin saadhna hai. [Acting is a way to understand oneself, but to practise that art is a very difficult exercise.]” But for Binodini, acting is a way to transcend her socially-scripted role as a low-born woman whose profession makes her irretrievably immoral in the eyes of society. Once on stage, she can be Juliet, Kanchan, Kapalkundala – or even Chaitanya Mahaprabhu.

The script gestures several times towards the irony that the theatre allowed her to transform herself into a bhadramahila by the sheer ability to act like one, but would not let her escape her tainted status in real life. Rather than catapulting her into respectability, the stage remains tied down by the immorality associated with actresses like herself. The alternative is also not appealing for a woman who has experienced her kind of professional success. As her mentor Girish Ghosh (played with conviction by the sonorous-voiced Jayanto Das) puts it, “Baganbari – that’s what your life will be reduced to if you leave the theatre”. (Baganbari - lit. garden house - is a kind of suburban villa that many of Calcutta’s bhadralok built as a retreat from the city.)

Director Amal Allana seeks to play with time and identity by having five different actresses play Binodini at different ages, and having them appear on stage at the same time. It’s an interesting experiment to watch, but the performances seem to clash and detract from each other, rather than allowing one to be moved by the power of a singular persona. The performances are also, by and large, extremely overblown – Salima Raza as the old Binodini has a pronounced hobble and wailing voice (not to mention her incorrect pronunciation of Bengali words) that are cringeworthy. It’s clear that the idea was to interleave the play with fragments in the melodramatic declamatory style popular in Binodini’s time, but that style seems to have taken over the production, making it difficult to be drawn in or moved by the acting. Nissar Allana’s lighting and set design is fantastic, with a transparent stage lit from below, as is Devajit Bandopadhyay’s immaculately-researched musical score, but in the end you’re left with the sense of a tremendous spectacle, and little else.

Published in Time Out Delhi, Issue 14 Friday, October 01, 2010

Court Martial

Swadesh Deepak’s 1970s play about caste in the army remains as searing as ever, finds Trisha Gupta

In the true tradition of the courtroom drama, the action of this now-classic play takes place almost entirely within four walls. The plot revolves around the trial of one Sawar Ramchandar, who is accused of having opened fire on two superior officers, Captains Kapoor and Varma. Only Kapoor survived and is now a witness in the court martial proceedings against Ramchandar.

The play opens with Ramchandar’s act of violence being treated by all concerned as unprovoked and inexplicable. Some time is spent on establishing that as the soldier on duty at the post, he could have – but had not – challenged the two senior officers in standard military fashion (by shouting out “Tham, kaun hai?”). Then the interrogation of the army doctor (a great potential cameo utterly wasted by Rahul Batra) brings to light a past incident when Ramchandar had reported sick, but been compelled to report for a hockey match based on Kapoor’s intervention (“These johnnies are always shamming”). Ramchandar had then collapsed on the field. As Bikash Rai, the righteous, sarcastic defence lawyer (decently played by Bajrang), begins to probe into these seemingly insignificant details, we are drawn deeper into the past relationship between Ramchandar and Kapoor, and an ugly tale of caste prejudice and violence emerges.

Asmita’s production has many flaws – the long-winded opening monologue by Deepak Ochani as Colonel Surat Singh, for instance, is often unintelligible because he speaks much too fast, and the “flashback” sequences, which invariably involve a bunch of shouting men running onto stage, are markedly amateurish in execution. But Swadesh Deepak’s tightly-structured script is both important and courageous, because it manages to convey how caste prejudice still simmers just below the surface of relationships in contemporary urban India, and because it does so by setting the action in a context which is itself deeply hierarchical – that of the Indian army.

The only weak link in the script is the character of Captain Kapoor, who is shown as nothing short of a monster: apart from being feudal and unremittingly casteist, he’s also an alcoholic who beats his wife. Such overkill can only detract from the play’s effect. As with any villain, you stop perceiving him as a regular guy – which is unfortunate, because this play could have demonstrated precisely how regular people, in regular jobs, regularly treat other human beings as inferior on the basis of their birth. Court Martial overstates the case – then again, perhaps this is an issue that can do with reiteration.

Time Out Delhi, 2007

Theatre Review: Tyagpatra

Rajinder Nath's theatrical adaptation of Jainendra's novel Tyagpatra: my review.

Tyagpatra is based on Jainendra Kumar’s classic novel of the same name, masterfully adapted for the stage by Delhi theatre veteran Rajinder Nath, founder and director of the theatre group Abhiyan. Tyagpatra is not the first novel that Rajinder Nath has worked with – he directed an NSD student production of Dharamvir Bharati’s 1950s novel Suraj Ka Saatvaan Ghoda in 1975, and staged Nirmal Verma’s Raat Ka Reporter in 2003.

The current production, however, is possibly more difficult to bring to life for a contemporary audience. Published in 1937, the play centres around a woman called Mrinal and her struggle to find a space for herself and her desires within the constricted contours of traditional society. The story is told by Mrinal’s nephew Pramod, now a middle-aged and highly-regarded judge, who has just received news of her death. The older Pramod is played by seasoned actor Banwari Taneja, whose narration superbly evokes the self-reflexive complexity of Jainendra’s character – nostalgic, angry and guilt-ridden by turns.

The first third of the play – the weakest portion – focuses on the child Pramod’s closeness to his aunt, the adolescent Mrinal (movingly played by Mallika Taneja). But this blissful shared childhood is cut short for good when Mrinal first gets romantically involved with a friend’s brother, and when the affair is discovered, is hastily married off to an uncouth middle-aged widower (V.K. Bindu in a nice cameo). This is the point at which the play stops being a rather predictable tale of oppressed Indian womanhood. Nothing so far has prepared us for what happens next – Mrinal’s disillusionment with marriage, her failed efforts to found her marriage on honest foundations and her final radical break with middle class morality. The two main scenes where Pramod (Ishwar), now a young man, seeks unsuccessfully to confront his Mrinal Bua, who has cut herself off from “civilized society,” astutely plumb the depths of middle class schizophrenia, and gain a great deal from Suchitra Gupta’s sharp-edged portrayal of an older, embittered Mrinal.

Like all Abhiyan productions, sets are minimal, and lighting is used sparingly. The play’s primary achievement is its credible revival of a story that must certainly have been shocking in 1937 – although what is really revealing is how much its candour can still surprise us today.

Published in Time Out Delhi, March 2007

Maulana Azad: Theatre Review

M Sayeed Alam’s dramatic monologue is not an easy play to sit through. It’s a solo performance with not a lot of action and many meandering stories about Congress politics before independence, and it’s two and a half hours long, with no interval. It’s also in a chaste Urdu that is often difficult to understand. (May we suggest a brochure that provides translations, at least of the Urdu couplets with which each scene begins?) Two things make the play watchable: the fact that the script is peppered with little titbits – Azad’s taste in tea (white jasmine), or how Nehru mumbled in his sleep – and a fluid, measured performance from Tom Alter, who plays Azad. It’s fun to listen to Alter dismiss British-Indian style tea as “liquid halwa”, propose that Ghalib’s Persian ustad Abdus Samad was an imaginary figure he invented for himself, or reminisce about how he taught himself English as a young man after reading Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s statement that Muslims could never progress if they did not take to Western education. But such trivia only makes an occasional appearance – most of the play is concerned with Azad’s views on his contemporaries, his responses to charges laid against him or the Congress, which he represented for much of his political career, or his fears about the future of Muslims in the subcontinent – what most people would consider the stuff of politics proper. Here the script takes its lead from Azad’s autobiography, India Wins Freedom, and doesn’t shy away from controversial topics, like that of whether the Congress could be said to be a “Hinduon ki jamaat” (party of Hindus), or the role that Nehru and Patel – and in Azad’s view, Gandhi himself – played in letting Partition happen. Maulana Azad’s firm opposition to the very idea of Partition – and his inability to ever reconcile himself to it – lies at the heart of the play. We hear Azad’s meditations on the absurdities that Partition involved – the fact that Allama Iqbal, the poet who wrote “Sare Jahan S e Acchha”, eventually became the much-feted national poet of Pakistan, while Jagannath Azad, who wrote the Pakistani national anthem, came to India in 1947 and eventually found a job in the government’s publication division. We hear his almost rhetorical – but grief-laden – question about what was to happen to the mosques and madarsas on this side of the border if the Muslims were all to leave for Pakistan, and his sad description of a mosque which had become a halwai’s shop. The politics and history is competently handled, though the play tries to pack in way too much and several references remain just that – scattered references. What stays with you after the play is a faint whiff of the man – a man who may not have had the much-mythologised elegance of a Nehru, the flamboyance of a Jinnah or the hot-headed oratory of a Bose, but who was still a titan of the sort that no longer populates our political universe. Trisha Gupta

Source : Time Out Delhi ISSUE 9 Friday, July 25, 2008

Theatre Review: Uttararamacharita

Hindi/ Urdu, National School of Drama, June 3 & 4

In the Uttarakhanda (believed to be a later addition to the Valmiki Ramayana), Rama learns from his guptachar (spy) – the aptly-named Durmukha – that his subjects are scathingly critical of his acceptance of Sita after nearly a year in captivity. Rama decides to abandon his pregnant wife in the forest, and a heroic romance is transformed into tragedy.

Over the centuries, many attempts have been made to rework the text, to somehow bring Rama and Sita together. Bhavabhuti’s eighth century Uttararamacharita is foremost among these literary interpretations of the Uttarakhanda. This classic Sanskrit play in seven acts has been translated into Hindi by Satyanarayan Kaviratna, and condensed into a three-act production by veteran playwright-director Prasanna and the members of the National School of Drama’s Repertory Company. 

The play can be said to have two parallel tracks – the first, the main romantic-tragic events that unfold in the lives of Rama and Sita, and the other a comedy track involving side characters or “common people” who comment on, deliver news of, and in one instance, even re-enact the events of the primary track. The actors in comic roles all have brilliant timing. The tragic sequences involving a rather camp Rama and a (deliberately?) melodramatic Sita are less impressive, perhaps because the contemporary tone and tempo of dialogue delivery doesn’t seem of a piece with the rather formal, poetic, alliterative language being used. Both end up seeming a trifle contrived. It’s in the musical and comic interludes and the recitation-like speeches of the guptachars that the language seems to come into its own. Perfectly choreographed by Vimla Shimladka and backed by Govind Pandey’s superlative music score (drawing on Mohan Upreti’s original compositions), these sequences provide a marvelously energetic dramatic experience.

Like all NSD Repertory productions, a great deal of attention has been paid to stage design and costumes, and it shows – though the more traditional-looking white sari-clad Sita and partly bare-chested Rama of the later sequences were infinitely preferable to the Harlequin-like clothes they wore in the first act. Another highlight of the production is the lighting design (by Parag Sarmah) and the innovative use of moving silhouettes on a large screen to create mood and additional dramatic effects with minimal ingredients.


Published in Time Out Delhi, 2008.

Kafka – Ek Adhyay

Hindi/Urdu, National School of Drama, June 10 & 11, 2007

If you’re a regular theatre-goer in Delhi, you probably have Molière and Ibsen coming out of your ears, and the mention of a Hindi play called Kafka sounds anything but exciting. But Suresh Sharma's tautly directed production, with its experimental use of multimedia, is quite different from the recycled classics that the theatre scene is awash with.

For one thing, the play isn’t based on something Franz Kafka wrote – it’s about the man himself. Right from the opening scene, when black-and-white images of the young Kafka are projected onto a screen at the back of the stage, to the haunting, dream-like, masquerade ball sequence that follows, the play makes for intriguing, often arresting, viewing – even when the multimedia effects don’t seem integral to the plot as they might be.

Asif Haider Ali’s script draws on Kafka’s diaries and the letters he wrote to his father, his sister and his lovers Felicia and Milena, to create an intense and harrowing portrait of the writer’s inner life. “I write differently from the way I speak, I speak differently from the way I think, I think differently from the way I should think – and so it goes on into the darkest depths of infinity,” as he put it in a letter to his sister Ottla in 1914.

Sajjad Hussain Khan brings to life a Kafka who moves from spiralling depression to dry wit and back again, playing the role with a degree of restraint that is all too rare. Kafka’s troubled relationship with his father Hermann, whom he once described as “a true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind, [and] knowledge of human nature,” is expertly handled, especially in the crucial (imagined) confrontation between Khan as Kafka and Naveen Thakur as his father. Neha Saraf as Ottla and Raj Sharma as Dora Diamant, a kindergarten teacher with whom he lived in Berlin towards the close of his short life, both do well.

The play doesn’t attempt the impossible task of trying to tell you why Kafka was the way he was, it doesn’t spout Freudian clichés (although the oedipal basis of Kafka’s lifelong depression is hinted at), and it doesn’t try to provide a potted history of pre- and post-war Germany. It only attempts a portrayal of a remarkably interesting man who happens to have lived in historically interesting times – and in this, it succeeds admirably. Trisha Gupta

Source : Time Out Delhi

Aurangzeb

Hindi, Shri Ram Centre, Sat Oct 6 & Sun Oct 7

The legendary war of succession between Aurangzeb and Dara Shikoh has the kind of dramatic potential that jumps out at you from the dullest textbook. Natwa’s production resurrects a Tamil play written a few months before the Emergency (in 1974), using the story to dwell on the dangers of dictatorship and religious bigotry.

The play moves back and forth between the familial sphere and a larger world of religion and politics, domestic squabbles within the royal household emerging as intimately tied to ideological battles. It is an involving tale with strongly etched characters – the once-magnificent Shah Jahan now reduced to senility; the plain, moralistic Roshanara with her childhood envy of the more attractive Jahanara, their father’s favourite; and of course, the aggressively pious Aurangzeb, willing to use any means at his disposal to defeat his brother Dara, whose belief in the truth of all religions is matched only by his faith in the wisdom of the riyaya, the people at large.

Sanjay Gautam is exceptional as the feeble, delusional Shah Jahan, and the scenes between him and Jahanara (Manleen Kaur) are superb. Roshanara, however, is played in an unnecessarily shrill manner by Laxmi Rawat, and the Aurangzeb-Dara opposition is too black-and-white, with Aurangzeb championing “one nation, one language, one religion” while Dara goes on about the spiritual equivalence of all faiths. Shrivardhan Trivedi’s self-possessed and philosophical Dara, all wild hair and booming voice, works much better than Mahendra Mewati’s Aurangzeb, whose sudden switch to half-demented old age leaves much to be desired. The sequence where he is assaulted by girls in gauzy costumes who represent “mausiki”, the music that he has banned all his life, would have been far more effective if played in a lower key.

The play could be much tauter – the second half has some strong lines, but their impact is reduced by the fact that they’re usually reiterating something that has already been mentioned before. Trisha Gupta

Source : Time Out Delhi Vol. 1 Issue 13, October 5 - 18, 2007

Ghalib in New Delhi

Somewhere between hell and heaven, Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, great Urdu poet of the nineteenth century, meets Faiz Ahmed Faiz, great Urdu poet of the twentieth century. Faiz tells Ghalib about all the awards, seminars and literary conferences that now happen in his name. Reduced to tears by this glowing account of his posthumous fame, Ghalib decides to revisit his beloved city to witness the situation for himself. In Delhi, of course, Ghalib’s conical topi and flowing green robe are greeted with half-hearted curiosity or bemusement. Most people he meets have no clue who he is, and he gets called everything from Dadabhai Naoroji to Bhishma Pitamah. Those who do recognise him have only heard his poetry as Jagjit Singh’s ghazals, or as recited by Naseeruddin Shah in an ’80s television serial.

The play’s basic premise – transplanting a poet who is the very embodiment of nineteenth century Dehlavi tehzeeb to the altogether less refined streets of modern New Delhi – is clever. And the playwright has a good ear for the linguistic oddities that make Delhi such an entertaining place to eavesdrop on conversations. But the play is riddled with hackneyed jokes, more often than not playing on Ghalib’s lack of familiarity with English and the corresponding inability of contemporary Dilliwalas to pronounce Urdu words. A paanwala’s rendition of “multiply” as “Mulaiti-plai” and Ghalib’s mishearing it as “Mulaithi Bai” is too contrived to be funny.

Even so, the play is kept afloat by convincing performances and pitch-perfect dialogue delivery from Digambar Prasad as a part-baffled, part-truculent Ghalib and Harish Chhabra as Bihari student Jai Hind, who makes Ghalib his roommate. Trisha Gupta

Time Out Delhi Vol. 1 Issue 3, May 4 - 17, 2007.

Pratham Parth

Hindi Circle Theatre Company’s production of Pratham Parth is based on Buddhadeb Bose’s 1969 verse play in Bangla. It looks at the Mahabharata from the perspective of one of its most fascinating characters, Karna: an outsider whose ostensibly lowly origins are the cause of repeated humiliation, but who remains embroiled in the power play of the Kuru and Pandava clans. The play opens in Karna’s private quarters in Kurukshetra on the eve of the great battle. One by one, Kunti, Draupadi and Krishna approach Karna, each hoping to use her or his special relationship with the great warrior to persuade him either to cross over to the Pandava side or remain neutral. The play has the advantage of having a storyline already known to pretty much everyone in the audience, which means that the actors are left free to explore the moral and psychological conflicts of their characters. But only Kunti (B Gauri) comes close to doing any such thing. Padma Damodaran’s Draupadi comes across as merely arch and flirtatious, almost fluffy. Ramesh Manchanda’s generally competent portrayal of Karna as the devastated son/jilted lover/vengeful rival is undermined by frequent over-the-top histrionics. B Gauri’s Kunti, however, is flawless; she is utterly convincing as a woman torn between her status as Kshatriya kul-vadhu and her position as a mother who wants nothing more than to be reunited with her elder son. The Doordarshan-style piped music introduced at crucial moments, however, ends up making even this affecting scene less credible. Director Bapi Bose’s lighting and costumes are innovative, managing to achieve a rich look without being fussy. The choreographed sequence with Sangeeta Sharma depicting Karna’s innermost desires is an interesting element, but the Rajasthani puppets that randomly appear (and just as randomly disappear) left us a bit confused, as did the climactic sequence, where the small boy we first assumed was Baby Krishna turned out to be Baby Karna. This is an ambitious production, but not an entirely successful one. The excessively Sanskritised Hindi – employed deliberately by Bose and his collaborator Manish Manoja – doesn’t help. Trisha Gupta

Source : Time Out Delhi Vol. 1 Issue 3, May 4 -17, 2007

30 Days in September: Theatre review

An Asmita production I reviewed for Time Out Delhi:

One of Asmita’s many adaptations of Mahesh Dattani plays originally written in English, 30 Days opens up the issue of child sexual abuse in a manner frank enough – in the Indian context – to be startling.  The play centres around a young woman named Mala whose relationships with men come with a fixed sell-by date: she has trouble keeping any of her affairs going for more than a month (hence the 30 days of the title). In fact, she maintains a calendar where she marks in advance the date on which the affair must come to an end. In one of the play’s opening scenes, Mala’s latest rejected boyfriend Deepak arrives at her home, hoping to try and understand why she has stopped answering his calls. Mala isn’t at home. Her mother, a nervy, anxious-looking woman with her shoulders perpetually hunched, first refuses to speak to Deepak, but later confesses that she doesn’t know where Mala is – or why she often disappears or deliberately cuts people off. Mala’s story – of having been sexually abused for years by her uncle, her mother’s own brother – unfolds gradually in a mix of first-person narratives and fraught conversations with her mother, alongside a parallel narrative that reveals the effects of that traumatic past on her present. The difficult role of Mala’s mother Shanta is essayed with effective understatement by Seema Mittal, while Girish Pal and Pushpraj Rawat provide more than competent support as the boyfriend and the oily, abusive uncle. Mala is played by two actresses who are, perhaps, intended to represent two periods in her life. (Or two aspects of the character? It’s unclear.) There’s the teary, distraught, childlike Mala, almost paralysed with grief and the sharp-talking, sassy young woman who conceptualises winning ad campaigns for sanitary napkins and is a compulsive flirt. The first portrayal (Jyoti Verma) is painfully repetitive and starts to drag from the word go – but the second (Amita Walia) manages to provide glimpses of the character’s conflicted inner life and complicated sexuality. One might want to dispute the play’s too-pat depiction of promiscuity and frigidity as two poles between which a (female) sexual abuse victim is necessarily caught, but it’s no small thing to have the issue dealt with on the Indian stage, especially by a group that’s committed enough to insist on a post-performance discussion with the audience. Source : Time Out Delhi Vol. 1 Issue 1, April 6-19, 2007