The Sanhita Manch Festival

Of Mice And Men

Being Association, the theatre group founded by Rasika Agashe and Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, started a Hindi playwriting competition last year, that led to the Sanhita ManchTheatre Festival.

In the second year, the competition saw an overwhelming response with a hundred entries, and three of the winning plays were staged at the Festival.

 Harus Marus, written by Mukesh Nema, and directed by Rasika Agashe, is a unique tale of humans and rats. Rats living in the warehouse of a village landlord, have been gnawing on bags of grain and causing damage. The landlord (Vipul Nagar) is mean-spirited enough to forbid his poor workers from taking the wheat scattered by the rats. He wants Garibprasad (Vikas Tripathi) to kill the rodents, but the poor man is hesitant, because rats are the vehicle of Lord Ganesha. Among the colony of rats are Harus (Saurabh Thakare) and Marus (Atul Kadam)- two white mice, who can speak like humans.

The landlord’s selfie-obsessed wife (Vaishnavi Dubey) persuades Garibnath to kill the rats, in return for which she will give him money for his older daughter’s engagement. Instead of killing the rodents, he drives them out, and ends up taking Harus and Marus home, where his younger daughter keeps them as pets.

 The landlord refuses the promised money, because Garibnath did not kill the rats, which is when Harus, Marus and their clan decide to help the family.

 The satire about humans being worse off than rats comes across in an entertaining manner, with songs (Amod Bhatt) and the large cast performing with enthusiasm.

 Pashmina, written by Mrinal Mathur, and directed by Sajida, is a serene and moving pieceabout an elderly couple (Joy Maisnam, Barnali Medhi) going to Kashmir, where their only son, a soldier was killed. Meeting a seller or Pashmina shawls (Mohan Joshi), who is also grieving over the death of his son, they somehow find closure. Without overstating anything, the play talks about the devastation of Kashmir by militancy, the forced eviction of the Pandits and the young lives needlessly lost.

Nirala written by Ashwini Kumar Tiwari and directed by Rajinder Singh, is about eminent Hindi poet-novelist Suryakant Tripathi Nirala. Written a non-linear style, with three actors playing Nirala at three stages of his life, the play would appeal more to those familiar with his work, and that of his contemporaries and friends, Mahadevi Verma and Sumitranandan Pant.

The three productions showed that even with simple staging, the power of words and performances can engage the audience. The Sanhita Manch initiative will hopefully grow, and over the next few years, give Hindi theatre in the country a bank of fine original plays.

Blind Date

Disability Is In The Mind

This is a kind of theatre too, not meant for aficionados, but for an occasional audience that is happy to see celebrities on stage; if it is a comedy so much the better.

Blind Date, directed by Prasad Khandekar, adapted by Raman Kumar from Pranav Tripathi's script, tries to make a cocktail of romance, comedy and high drama, with mixed results.

Watching the first show is perhaps not ideal, because it is all over the place, with many superfluous scenes. The actual point of the plot does not even kick in till the play is almost halfway through. 

Nisarg (Jay Soni) and Dhara (Cheshta Bhagat) are engaged to be married even though they are not perfectly compatible; he is an engineer (working on the bullet train!) who only thinks in tech terms, while she is a travel agent who tends to get poetic over nature.

Nisarg is driving and talking on the phone over Dhara's protests, when the car meets with an accident. Nisarg is unhurt but Dhara loses her sight. Her life, and that of her parents (Ani Shah, Sanjay Bhatia), comes crashing down. She wallows in self pity, till her uncle, Bunty (Pranav Tripathi) traces a Hanuman devotee Pawan aka Bajrangi (Pritam Singh) to help her regain her confidence. 

It would be a spoiler to reveal how he achieves this, but these scenes were the most watchable-- funny and moving.

A Bhojpuri spouting Pritam Singh channels his inner Bachchan, but owns the stage when he is on. Pranav Tripathi is comfortable in his comic role; the two lead actors still need to work on modulating their speech-- they either mumble or shout.

Blind Date has a worthwhile premise—that disability need not mean the end of life; with some trimming and polishing, it could be vastly improved.

Accidental Death Of An Anarchist

Fo Served Fresh

Dario Fo’s play Accidental Death Of An Anarchist (written in 1970) is a masterpiece. It has been translated into several languages and performed all over the world, because, police brutality and political clampdowns are an ugly reality audiences from every country can recognize.

 Written as a response to the political corruption and anarchic conditions in Italy, post World War II, Fo was inspired by the actual death of a railway worker and suspected anarchist in police custody. The cops claimed the man committed suicide by jumping off the fourth floor window, while it was obvious that he had been beaten and flung out to make murder look like suicide or an accident.

A new production in Hindi, by the Jeff Goldberg Studio, skillfully directed by Ashok Pandey brings energy and freshness to the oft-staged play. It is set in North India, where the cops are more uncouth, violent and corrupt than anywhere else. It was Fos genius that converted a grim tragedy into a farce that makes audience laugh and feel uneasy at the same time.

A Madman (Prashant Singh) is brought into the police station where the incident had taken place.  He annoys the two cops on duty (Tushar Sharma, Akshat Mishra), claiming that he cannot be arrested because he is mad, and gets them all riled up. When the inspector rushes off to a meeting, the Madman snoops through files that give him information about the case. He answers the phone from another cop and learns that an investigating judge is to come to the station. So, changing his appearance a bit, he goes up to the floor from where the man had jumped and pretends to be the judge.

The three policemen on duty, Superintendent Verma (Sanjay Gurbaxani), Inspector Pahuja (Shashank Parihar) and the hyperactive constable (Akshat Mishra) are a bit nervous about the judge’s visit. As the Madman questions them, they keep contradicting themselves. The Madman convinces them that he wants to help them polish up the story and prove their innocence. This sequence gets increasingly ludicrous as the cops’ lies tie them up in knots.

Then, a journalist (Rutuja Awaghad) arrives to interview the Inspector about the anarchist’s death. The Madman impersonates a forensic expert, so that he can help them deal with the journalist. He hobbles in pretending to have a wooden leg, a false arm and a stone eye and in one hilarious scene, has them all crawling on the floor looking for the eye that has fallen off.

The actors, get into the spirit of the farce, and, even in the limited space at the studio, display remarkable agility and comic timing.  A very entertaining and provocative evening at the theatre.

Amar Photo Studio

Memories Are Made Of This

Amar Photo Studio, written by Manaswini Lata Ravindra and directed by Nipun Dharmadhikari, has been one of the successes on the Marathi stage in recent months. It has also won multiple awards and travelled abroad. That the cast is made up of popular television actors could be one reason, the play’s funky fantasy plot (reminiscent of Hollywood films like Back To The Future) could be another.

Apu (Suvrat Joshi) and Tanu (Sakhi Gokhale) are in love, but he is due to travel for further studies, and she suggests breaking up, because she believes long distance relationships don’t work. During the process of their bickering they arrive at an old-style Amar Photo Studio, which, strangely they have not noticed till then. The eccentric owner (Amey Wagh) explains that “you see it only when you need to see it.” The studio with sepia photographs on the walls and an ancient camera fascinates the two of them.

Apu and Tanu pose in front of period backdrops and find themselves transported to that era—Apu to a Forties film studio, where V. Shantaram (also played by Wagh) is shooting Dr Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani, so the costumes, set and even tea are black and white. Apu runs into actress Chandrika (Pooja Thombre), who speaks in the simpering way women used in films of that period, and is blasé about being exploited by the arrogant lead star (Siddhesh Purkar), because, well, the world back then hasn’t heard of the MeToo movement.

Tanu lands up, whooping with excitement in the Seventies, when the Emergency is at its peak, and so is the hippie era.

It would be a spoiler to reveal more about the characters, but it is fun to see the actors play multiple parts with ease, and also to connect the dots that lead to the clever finale, that answers the reasons for the blocks in Apu and Tanu’s love story.

The sets need a coat of paint, but the changes were quick and smooth and, despite its long running time, which makes a few longeurs inevitable, Amar Photo Studio is a very enjoyable play.