There has been a lot of theatre this past fortnight. The annual India International Centre (IIC) “Festival of the Arts” opened on October 15 with the widely acclaimed musical collage of theatre, literature and history Stories in a Song, directed by Sunil Shanbag with music selected and composed by Shubha Mudgal and Aneesh Pradhan. The play traces the story of music making in India and the tough life of the musicians — both real and imaginary. It takes the help of theatre to tell stories of musical forms like kajri, thumri-dadra, khyal, remixes with verve and gusto.
The actor-singer, a combination Sunil Shanbag admitted he found with great difficulty, carried the show with extremely good performances. The showstopper was Ketaki Thatte, a little packet of dynamite whose performance as the Bahadur Ladki, in the eponymous Nautanki created by the legendary Gulab Bai, showed she is a complete performer — singer, dancer and actor.
Her witty and daring confrontation in song, with an abusive British officer in colonial India, was perhaps the highlight of the show. Nautanki is the traditional musical theatre popular in North India, particularly Uttar Pradesh.
There are two gharanas or schools, the Kanpur and the Hathras gharanas. The former is dialogue-oriented whilst the latter tells the story almost entirely via music. Historically, the Nautanki Bahadur Ladki is a good example of the political plays written as protest against the British oppression.
In a rarely heard of story by Amritlal Nagar, Yeh Kothewaliyan that narrates the odd encounter between the tawaifs of Benares and Mahatma Gandhi, Ketaki was outstanding as the singer of the typical style of thumri then heard in the kothas of Banaras. Reporting on the meeting called by the tawaifs who are under attack by social reformers determined to put an end to the “evils” of the tawaif tradition explain that Gandhi ji on knowing their financial situation asked then to continue singing. No profession is bad as long as it is practised honestly.
Hindustani Air was a humorous piece lampooning the memsahibs’ interest in collecting and transcribing Hindustani songs and melodies popularly known as Hindustani Airs, and setting them to English style singing. the meeting between Lady Isabella Hardinge and the nautch performer Khanum Jaan is as funny as the effort of Lady Hardinge to transfer on to her music paper the mukhada of the melody Khanum Jaan is singing. Both the actors in this section, Mansi Multani and Pia Sukanya, are good singers and deadpanned effectively. Kajri is associated with the monsoon in UP it is the principal form of seasonal folk music that became part of the thumri dadra repertoire in classical music.
In the Gangetic belt, there were kajri akhadas where the ustads maintained a gharana system like in classical music in genres like khyal.
There was rivalry amongst the akhadas and dangals or competitions were organised to establish supremacy in kajri singing and kajri writing. A samasya or a poetic fragment would be given to the opposition for musical and literary elaboration. With the excellent performer Namit Das and his companion in an exuberant display of this tradition, the finale was a befitting end to this delightful work.
The other festival in town was the “10th Old World Theatre Festival: Celebrating Humour”, at the India Habitat Centre, which featured stand-up comics like Vir Das, Papa C.J., Abhish Mathew, Sanjay Rajoura, Maya Rao and humourists like Ashok Chakradhar, Popular Merathi and others in the Ganga-Jamuni Hasya Kavi Milan. The festival opened with a dastangoi presented by Dastak where Mahmood Farooqui is trying to train new boys in the art of storytelling or dastangoi.
The two young persons who performed have miles to go before they can be called dastangos. Revived by Mr Farooqui, this ancient art of storytelling has two men sitting on their knees, clad in white and narrating tales in Urdu from the Tilism-e-Hoshruba. The first tale for that evening was about the childhood of the protagonist Amir Hamza and his bosom pal Amir Aiyyar who, as the name implies, is clever as in naughty.
Aiyyar’s antics as a grown man were displayed in the second story narrated by two more disciples of Mr Farooqui. They fared a little better in the Aazar Jaadoo story where Amir Aiyyar and his disciples enter the tilism-e-hoshruba, (a magical realm that enchants the senses) to rescue Amir Hamza’s grandson.
The dastangoi’s art consists of painting pictures of the event, place or person via the words the dastango or the storyteller uses and his interpretation of the word. Yogjit Singh and Ankit Chadha did provide some moments of understanding and displayed glimpses of the art, particularly when describing the environment. Manu S. Dhingra and Nadeem Shah were less successful.
Taxi, staged by the Actor-Factor Theatre Company, at the Muktahdhara auditorium harks back to the spirit of the absurd. It speaks of the incompleteness of the individual in search of the intangible something that is missing from their lives. Indrani, a playback singer on the make, comes out and takes a taxi. When the driver asks where she has to go, her reply is nowhere. They travel some distance and her lover comes out of nowhere. They quarrel and he disappears. The taxi driver and Indrani have bouts of acrimony when their wishes about the direction the route must now take clash. The psychedelic journey ends when the taxi, driven recklessly by Indrani, crashes.
The spare stage has three chairs — two downstage, placed on left and right depicting the drivers and the passenger seat next to him, which Indrani occasionally occupies. The chair centre upstage is placed upon platforms at a higher level is the back seat where Indrani sits. The story, by Shashwat Shrivastava, has been adapted by Sunit Sinha whose direction is good and the stage is well-designed. Sunit Sinha also plays the taxi driver with restraint and understanding. Vaishali Chakravarty is an actor to watch out for; she has depth of emotional expression and an agile body.
Andha Yug, staged by Bhanu Bharti in the Ferozeshah Kotla’s historic ruins, was the talk of the town. Bhanu’s reading of the epic verse drama, by Dharamvir Bharati, goes beyond the main issue of it as an anti-war text. He explores the gray areas of “half truths” that, according to Bhanu, “even more than blatant lies, destroy our innermost humanness”.
Yudhishthir, the eldest of the Pandavas also known as Dharmaraja or repository of Dharma declares: “Ashwatthama is dead” and then mutters under his breath “either the man or the elephant”. On hearing this Dronacharya, Ashwatthama’s father, throws down his arms and is brutally murdered by Drishtyudum.
This news makes Ashwatthama, who is fighting on the side of the Kauravas, go mad with rage. He then witnesses the death of Duryodhan where at a signal from Krishna, Bhim attacks him on the groin and kills him. Ashwatthama, crazed by anger, goes about killing anyone who thinks differently from him. Attacking the victorious Pandava camp at night, he slaughters Drishtyadum and others asleep.
He then sends his Brahmastra to destroy the rest of the Pandavas. At the behest of Vyasa who tells him he will destroy the entire world. He changes the direction and sends the weapon to Uttara’s womb to kill the child, who will head the next generation of the Pandavas.
Tikam Joshi is violent enough as Ashwattama, but the image of the red loin clothed man on a swing, wrestling in the sand pit, listening to the owl’s tale, stays; that was the epitome of Ashwatthama in the NSD student production directed by Pravin Kumar Gunjan in 2009.
In fact, the production was the only contemporary version of the classic play one has seen. Bhanu’s production appeared dated in contrast.
The same style of acting as in earlier productions, the same style of dialogue delivery, the same interpretation of the characters, with many of the actors having acted in earlier presentation.
The immense open-air performing area with the forest on the right featuring large rocks created out of synthetic material, and king Dhritrashtra’s throne room on the left with open area between was conventional deployment of the acting area. All the star performers did not stir one or bring any new insight into Andha Yug.