First Love

Thespian Alert

Like his selection of films, Naseeruddin Shah’s choice of plays that he does with his group Motley, is also unpredictable.  But audiences love to see him on stage, so every play he appears in gets ’em flocking to the theatre.

His last play,  A Walk In The Woods (with Rajit Kapoor, directed by Ratna Pathak Shah) is a sell out, but it does contain popular elements. His latest, Samuel Beckett’s First Love (a short story converted to a theatrical piece) is an unusual choice.  A dark piece about a misogynistic man, who lives on a park bench after being thrown out of the family home, is as funny as it is disturbing.  

The tramp-like man is given shelter by a hooker, and accepts her largesse as it were his due and letting her serve him as he lolls on a couch. That he might be in love with her is indicated in a comic and yucky scene in which he writes her name in cowpat and licks his finger.

Shah played the creepy guy with an irresistible charm,  that has audiences riveted for 90 minutes, studded with many laugh-out-loud moments.  So many of them had travelled long distances to NCPA’s Godrej Theatre to see him, and were rewarded with undiluted Beckett-- sardonic, witty, honest and nasty.  What they didn’t know was that Shah rehearsed meticulously and performed in spite of a painful back, because he had committed to the show for NCPA's Centrestage Festival.  That standing ovation was richly deserved.

Our Town

Classic Gold

Ask anyone who does theatre in Mumbai, how tough it is to get two actors together, leave aside 20!  Akvarious’s Our Town, a Pulitzer Prize-winning classic by Thornton Wilder, is a poignant, low-key yet dramatic portrayal of ordinary life in an American town in the early 20th century. Directed by Akash Khurana, who also plays Wilder’s narrator or Stage Manager, Our Town shows that there can be poetry in everyday life, and something as routine as the newspaper boy delivering the paper, the train passing in a distance,  the voices of the choir carrying into the quiet evening air can become punctuations in the days and nights that are lived with little variation, but lots of joys and sorrows.  Watching the play today brings about a harsh realisation of how much life has progressed, and also how little this the progress has added to the day-to-day living of ordinary people.

Khurana always manages to get the right actors for the main parts—even though the ones who play parents are much too young.  Still Faisal Rashid as the town doctor and father of the young romantic (Karan Pandit) who woos and weds the girl next door (Abir Abrar) has the kindliness and dignity of old-style patriarchs.  The mothers, Lucky Vakharia and Prerna Chawla are charming.

Young audiences might see a glimpse of the past in the play, while seniors are likely to be awash in nostalgia. Akash Khurana had adapted the play in an Indian setting, and lost it.  He is still searching for it.

Shivaji Underground in Bhimnagar Mohalla

The Real Thing


Shivaji Underground in Bhimnagar Mohalla is a title that evokes curiosity. Nandu Madhav’s new play, written by Rajkumar Tangde, based on Shahir Sambhaji Bhagat’s rousing songs, examines the legends around Chhatrapati Shivaji and also puts forward his true legacy. It then leaves viewers to decide for themselves what they’d rather accept—the politically motivated picture of a great leader, or the historical truth; and as it stirs the mind the robust musical also entertains.  What makes it all the more praiseworthy, is that it has been performed by farmers from Jalna (a small town in Maharashtra).

Marathi theatregoers would remember the play Aakda, also by Tangde and his troupe of farmer actors from Jalna, also brough to Mumbai by Nandu Madhav.This stunning piece of agit-prop theatre was staged in darkenss to let city dwellers know what it’s like to live without electricity. Nandu Madhav is, of course, still remembered for his role as Dadasaheb Phalke in Paresh Mokashi’s film, Harishchandrachi Factory.

The actors in Shivaji.., fantastic singers with powerful speaking voices, rehearsed in the fields after work, and what they have come up with is a wonderfully provocative work, that brings out facets of Shivaji that should be underlined more.

Shivaji hoodwinks Yamaraj and escapes back to earth, leaving his turban behind as guarantee. The hapless Yama has to roam through the centuries with the headgear and look for a head of the right size. Meanwhile in present times, a political group, headed by a strident woman, Akka, and her cohorts, want to celebrate Shivaji Jayanti. While the political opportunists wish to portray Shivaji as a slayer of the ‘enemy’, a group of Ambedkar followers from Bhimnagar want to project him as he really was – progressive, secular, just,visionary.

The production is an attractive blend of music, humour and political thought, and dhamaal. Marathi audiences do not grant standing ovations easily, but this play earned it, from a mixed crowd of intellectuals and workers at Mumbai's Experimental Theatre.

The play has, predictably, run into trouble in a couple of places, but on thewhole, the response has been tremendous. It is a significant play at a timewhen light weight entertainment seems to satisfy most theatre audiences.

Chitragoshhti

Art As Drama


Sushama Deshpande usually works on fresh and very interesting material. Her last play Bayaa Daar Ughad, on the female poetsaints of Maharashtra, was a well-researched and rousing piece of musical theatre. In the supportive atmosphere of Awishkar, one of Mumbai’s most oldest theatregroups, under the leadership of Arun ‘Kaka’ Kakade, she is free to experiment with form and content.

Her new Marathi play Chitragoshhti, also withAwishkar, has its origins in the art of Sudhir Patwardhan—whose work portrayed the lives of ordinary Mumbaikars with striking effect.  The theatricality of his art was what Deshpande sought to capture and the production was devised after putting 21 actors--most of them young-- through an art appreciation workshop and then letting them improvise their responses to Patwardhan’s paintings-- particuarly his mill worker series and the family series, rich with unspoken stories hidden in the canvas.  In between, Abhinetri and Running Woman gave a chance to three bright young actresses to do their thing-- why don't Patwardhan's paintings portray women, they ask. Patwardhan says, they didn't choose the ones with women in them.

What undoubtedly made the exercise more exciting was the artist’s active participation--in the selection of paintings, sitting in on discussions and interacting with the actors during rehearsals. It’s not very often that this kind of collective process is used in theatre, and Chitragoshhti shows the way for more such creative collaborations.

A Walk In The Woods

A Man For All Seasons


Ratna Pathak Shah made her directorial debut with A Walk in the Woods, starring Naseeruddin Shah and Rajit Kapur. Lee  Blessing’s original set during the Cold War with two negotiators, from the US and USSR trying to find a way ahead for a peaceful future, lends itself perfectly to an adaptation with present day situation between India and Pakistan.  Faisal Rashid and Randeep Hooda’s adaption is excellent, and they bring in a lot of references (Bollywood, cricket) and nuances that are easily identifiable even by those who don’t know or care much about the murky world of diplomacy.  The relations between India and Pakistan are in a strange grey zone, where the people have great love for a common culture and language, while political leaders and military heads battle over so many contentious issues of which cross-border terrorism is just one.

At such a time Jamaluddin Lutfullah (Naseeruddin Shah) from Pakistan and Ram Chinappa (Rajit Kapur) India meet in neutral Switzerland to negotiate peace.  Lutfullah (the word Lutf or enjoyment in his name seems indicative of his nature) is an old hand at the game, while Chinappa comes to the table as a raw and optimistic bureaucrat, who believes that talks can solve every crisis.

While it becomes clear quite quickly, there is really no political will to solve the bigger issues,  the play becomes more of a verbal and emotional pas de deux between the two men, and year after year, they end up taking a walk away from the formal negotiation set up, to the same bench in the same forest and try find meaning in a hopeless pursuit.

The play is funny, warm, poignant and completely gripping, for which the director and the two brilliant actors can take full credit.  Nothing but the best can be expected from Naseeruddin Shah,  but Rajit Kapur matches him every step of the way.  Elegant costumes, a simple set, evocative light design, unobtrusive sound and minimal use of music lets the focus remain on the actors and the words they speak, with clarity and expressiveness.

Ek Madhavbaug

A Tribute to Datar


Chetan Datar’s Ek Madhavbaug is not only a playabout unconditional love and acceptance; it also has one of the best roles created for a mature actress. (Revathy has performed an English version.)

When the play was first written, there wasn’t such a glut of writing on gay issues, nor was there so much sympathetic coverage in the mainstream media. The play was a plea for understanding alternative sexuality, both from the point of view of a young gay man, who is tormented by the “why me?” question till he is able to come to terms with himself, and that of his mother who discovers her son’s hidden life suddenly when she gets an unpleasant phone call.  The actress who plays the mother stars by ‘clarifying’that it has nothing to do with her, but by the end of it, she is willing to do battle with the playwright, over the young man committing suicide.  Through the device of the actresses on stage playing the character of an actress doing the part of the mother, Datar managed to slide in multiple points of view.

The mother, who is first shocked by the revelation and wonders if it was somehow her fault, is then given a diary, by the son, and through it, she understands what he went through, and the diary in the form of letters to her, is his plea for her support.

After over a decade, Ek Madhavbaug (the address of a middle class building in conservative Shivaji Park) it remains the best and most complete play, written in India, about the gay issue; not surprisingly, the Humsafar Trust revived it, and after a series of readings, now have a full-fledged production in Hindi, performed by Mona Ambegaonkar (who also translated it with Vivek Anand), and directed by Vijay Kenkre.

It is a poignant and gently provocative (the way Datar chided religion interfering with the personal) piece of writing, and Mona Ambegaonkar performed it with the passion and emotional involvement that it demanded. 

Time Boy

Magic Moments

A few months after playing an ageing Goan patriarch trying to adjust to changes around the traditional Bandra neighbourhood, in Pereira’s Bakery at 76 Chapel Road, Hidayat Sami goes ahead and plays a seven-year-old kid in Makrand Deshpande’s Time Boy a few months later.

Grown-ups play kids in a lot of productions—casting real kids curtails the life of a play, since they have to go back to school after vacations—but for a six-foot something, strapping guy to convincingly portray a small child requires suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience (many kids among them) and the ability on the part of the actor to make them ignore his appearance and accept him as a seven-year old, which Hidayat manages admirably.

In the play, written by Nivedita Pohankar, Hidayat playing Murli, with a Bengali mother (Pohankar with her near perfect accent) and Malayali father, hates school.  His eccentric teacher (Divya Jagdale, overdoing the Kerala accent) doesn’t quite know how to control him. He has two friends, a Punjabi girl, whose pushy-mother (Amruta Mane, hilarious) wants her to be a model, and a tantrum throwing boy, who flings himself on the ground and howls if he disagrees with something (Romi Jaspal, amusing), with whose help he builds a time machine out of a washing machine, so that he can travel to the future and see what he will grow up to be.

The time travel is not the point of the play, however, what comes across is the ease and warmth of the parent-child relationship and friends who support unconditionally. Like most kids, Murli changes his mind, one day he wants to be a politician(with his symbol being a blank piece of paper representing time), next day he wants to be an astronaut.

Without a clear plot, the play coasts along on the sweetness of the relationships and the mischief of the kids, and in the end, perhaps without meaning to, Time Boy says a lot about innocence and the motivating power of dreams.

Zinga Zinga Roses

Yahoo Yago!


If children (and accompanying grown-ups) were to vote for the most popular stage villain at the summer season of children’s plays this year, they’d undoubtedly pick Yago from Zinga Zinga Roses, played by Neil Bhoopalam in a strange Star Trek meets Michael Jackson outfit, with cheerful abandon and a weapon as deadly as stinky armpits.

Written and directed by Trishla Patel, the play was about the adventures of little Zinga from Planet Sesor, who has to travel to Earth, and with the help of his robot Pi and some Earth kids, save the Rose that can save his planet from evil Yago.

Trishla pulled out all stops for this one, with a large cast, live music, elaborate costumes, animation and a wacky imagination that hit the target.  As the children on stage dash about all over the world, with Yago in pursuit, children in the audience enjoyed the madness. A bit too long for today’s abbreviated attention spans, it did nevertheless have kids coming out speaking like Sesorians, with an ‘it’ added after every word.

This was one of the few children’s plays that had a some kids in the cast and that always works better than grown-ups in shorts and frocks imitating children.  (Manav Kaul pulled it off brilliantly in his Laal Pencil, managing to find actors who looked like children without much effort. Om Katare’s school going boy in Listen to Me Please was hopelessly miscast.)

The Bureaucrat

Babu Diaries

That Mumbai audiences are partial to comedy was proved once again by the packed shows of Rahul da Cunha’s new play The Bureaucrat, written by Anuvab Pal, who is a wiz with comedy and a regular on the city’s stand-up comedy circuit. Rahul da Cunha teams up for the second time with Pal, after Chaos Theory. The Bureaucrat grew out of a short piece Pal wrote for Rage’s production One On One, which in 15 minutes or so encapsulated what went wrong with Nehru’s India. The full-length play is more about today’s India without much patience for nostalgia. 

A fabulous cast, led by Bugs Bhargava Krishna as an old bureaucrat (with Aseem Hattangady playing his younger self-cum-conscience) kicked downstairs by the home minister (ably played by Jaswinder Singh with a Haryanvi-Dilli accent) reminded audiences of corruption in high places, amidst a society changing so rapidly that a 31-year-old VJ Dhishoom (Nein Bhoopalam) finds that he can’t keep up with the new teen lingo and attitude. The mantri-babu scenario immediately brings to mind the brilliant TV series Yes Minister (also its sequel Yes Prime Minister), only here the bureaucrat is not one to hoodwink the clueless politician, it’s the other way round. Pal and da Cunha must also have dropped the idea of sophisticated or understated humour for the broad, crowd-pleasing farce ofThe Bureaucrat and they hit it right in the head—the laughter often drowns out the lines. The funniest part of an opportunistic bimbo, the minister’s Girl Friday is played by Anu Menon, who rises above the stereotype of the silly secretary to nearly steal the show. But those expecting something deep or thought provoking (and comedy can be that too) might be disappointed.

Jungle Book

Animal Tales

Rangbaaz Group’s Jungle Book, directed by Shivani Tanksale and Sumeet Vyas with a supporter in Seher Latif and a backstage team that pulled out all stops to make the production enjoyable, plus actors who had kids in the audience go a little wild with excitement, is an example on how huge budgets are not needed when imagination is in overdrive.

Umbrellas painted in fluorescent colours make for an enchanted forest (Sunil Pandit, wow!), where a “man cub” Mowgli (Mayur More) is raised by wild animals.  The animal costumes with masks (by Shawn Lewis) and the creation of puppets (Pavitra Sarkar) for the garrulous vultures, and it is easy for a child to imagine Rudyard Kipling’s classic coming alive on stage. The cheeky monkeys with orange bottoms and red tails were delightful enough, but the star of the show was Faezeh Jalali playing the serpent Kaa—an instant hit with children who gaped as she slithered down on red cloth and did her mallakhamb moves, dressed in a gold body suit.  “I say hiss, you say Kaa,” she crooned and had kids screaming “Kaa” and by the end of the show totally besotted by her.

The Hindi was a bit difficult for very young children to follow (for instance, how many kids would know what gorakh dhanda means?), but for the story of Mowgli’s identity crisis, his friendship with Baloo and Bagheera and his fight with Sher Khan language was no barrier. Children understood the story,  and going by the demands of clicking pictures with the characters after the show, they had a great time.

Theatre for children is getting better and better as so many groups mount productions specially for kids during summer vacations.  And it is heartening to see that city children’s taste is not jaded by a glut of films, TV, video games and internet sites—they are still taken in by the magic of a live performance.  So many children must have seen Jungle Book cartoons, but they did not take away from their experience of watching on stage. 

Maro Piyu Gayo Rangoon

Global Gujarati

Mumbai's Gujarati audiences got a play that is totally different from the domestic dramas and comedies that abound on stage, and they rose to encourage and bestow full houses on Sunil Shanbag’s musical Maro Piyu Gayo Rangoon,  based on Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well.

The original, which is lightweight and a bit silly-- considered one of Shakespeare's problem plays-- has been adapted so beautifully by Mihir Bhuta, that it could easily pass off as a play written for the Gujarati stage.  And then, what a line of singer-actors Shanbag has managed to get; add to that lovely costumes (Maxima Basu), melodious music (Uday Mazumdar), simple yet elegant stage design (Nayantara Kotian) and the production syncs perfectly with the taste of the Gujarati audience looking for an enjoyable theatre experience.

Helen/ Heli  (Mansi Parekh), who does all she can to bag the man she loves, is a spirited young woman who is spurred by the challenge thrown at her by the feckless object of her affection—Bertram/Bharatram (Chirag Vora).  Bharatram, encouraged by his wicked friend Parolles/Parvat (Satchit Puranik), dreams of travel, adventure and wealth with the help of his Mumbai-based uncle Seth Gokuldas Gandhi  (Utkarsh Mazumdar).  He leaves behind his kindly mother (Meenal Patel) and Heli in the village.  The latter follows him to Mumbai, wins his hand in marriage, and when he runs off to Rangoon, goes there too, and schemes with Burmese princess Alkini (Nishi Doshi) to fool him. Archan Trivedi as thesutradhar and Laffa bhai, and Ajay Jairam as the Seth’s loyal servant complete the very able cast.  However, it’s Utkarsh Mazumdar who brings a special energy to his scenes, as a sick old man, and later a brook-no-nonsense aristocrat.

Even those who don’t know the Shakespeare play would find the plot simple and predictable, the charm lies in the ebullient staging.  And if a few more plays that break the mould of popular commercial Gujarati plays come up,  it might just help get rid of the TV soap like productions that continue to be offered to audiences, thus ensuring that young people stay away from watching or doing Gujarati plays.

Ok Tata Bye Bye

Women On The Verge

Purva Naresh’s Ok Tata Bye Bye, directed by Rabijita Gogoi (part of the Writer’s Bloc Festival) speaks in a brave female voice that challenges socially accepted gender equations.

A pair of filmmakers (Ahlam Khan Karachiwala-Jim Sarbh) come to a North Indian village to make a documentary on a caste that initiates its women into prostitution. Settled next to the highway, they cater mainly to the transient trucker population.

Seema (Prerna Chawla—brilliant), the bright, chatty young woman they hope to make the focus of their film, takes them on a merry ride, but by the end of it, she questions the middle-class city assumptions about her chosen line of work, about female empowerment and sex as a bargaining force between men and women.  According to Seema, she has a better life than many of the married women of her class, and certainly better than the tentative, no-name, no-commitment relationship between the filmmaker and her white boyfriend.  “We are same to same,” Seema insists and dares anyone to contradict her. The NGOs who tell her to give up her profession for the sake of self-respect get a tongue-lashing too.

Even if the play overlooks the child abuse and exploitation angle of the flesh trade, Purva creates characters like Seema and her more manipulative friend (Nishi Doshi), who know what they want and despite all the odds their low caste, poverty and lack of adequate education places before them, they reach their goals.

The language is colourful, the interactions between the women and the cheerful truck driver (Gagan Riar) caught in the battle not of his choosing, open and piquant. The audience probably emerges with some of their ideas of morality a bit shaken.

Pereira’s Bakery at 76 Chapel Road

Ode to the City


For those who grew up around the predominantly Catholic settlements of Bandra and Santacruz (in  Mumbai), Ayeesha Menon’s Pereira’s Bakery at 76 Chapel Road is like a shot of pure nostalgia.
Over the years, the fairytale cottages and close-knit communities have given way to impersonal highrises, and even though the Pereiras and their neighbours are fighting a losing battle, you root for them. Hidayat Sami plays Pereira with a straight-backed dignity that also seems to have been lost when the landscape of these areas changed.

In Menon’s evocative play (part of the Writers’ Bloc Festival), directed by Zafar Khan Karachiwala, Vincent Pereira, his wife (Deepika Amin), daughter Annie (Ahlam Khan Karachiwala) and neighbours try to stand up to the might of the builders, who want to demolish their home to build a car park for the large shopping mall coming up on the neighbouring plot. The sounds of drilling and hammering of new constructions punctuate their day.

Menon has created her characters lovingly and without turning them into broad caricatures.  The crabby, sharp-tongued Pinto (Darius Shroff is a revelation!), the deaf old Colonel (Sohrab Ardeshir), an Indian Idol aspirant (Nisha Lalvani) and her mother (Tahira Nath). They speak in the lilting tones of old Bandra and treat each other as family.  All this is about to end, and there is no help forthcoming – neither from the media, nor NGOs or community groups. The bakery with its traditional recipes handed down from father to son, is also losing out to mass-produced chain food stores.

The drama of love, betrayal and breaking of bonds is played out on fabulous set of a crumbling old tenement.  Many in theaudience admitted to have been moved to tears.