This year’s Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards (META) was a trifle off colour. In the sense that the plays one saw at the festival were not of the best quality. There wasn’t one play anywhere near the calibre of last year’s Deepan Sivaraman’s Spinal Cord or Sunil Shanbag’s Sex Morality and Censorship. The Interview, by first-time playwright Siddharth Kumar, is a well-written script that won the top award for the best play. The interviewee, Karan Pandit, who won the best actor award, on his meeting with the boss of one of the largest corporate houses in the country is quite unprepared for the events that end in a murder. Caught in the internal rivalries, jealousies and affairs of the office, the young man is forced to look at how business houses work.
Sickened with his experience, he still wants the job for its stature and money. Kashin Shetty, who was awarded the best supporting actor, played the cunning boss with incisive nastiness to the point of brutality. Akarsh Khurana, the director, won the award for an excellent stage design.
The Manipuri Mythical Surrender won the best original script award for its writer Buddha Chingtham. The issue is universal in the Northeast: Anger at the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) or the Black Act imposed by the Central government in Manipur. Here the force is represented by a snake battalion. This group of snakes finds and rapes the widow of a poor dweller on the floating island on the Lake Lotak. Her husband is hanged by a rope after strangling. Using eloquent poetry, the widow decries her fate and wants the snake child in her womb to die. But the foetus begs her to let him live. (The scene was overly stretched) Her father-in-law visits the island in search of his son.
The rapist chief of battalion leaves the infant in the mother’s care, but returns to claim him when he is a child. The battalion returns with the grown-up son. He is just like one of them. He shoots his grandfather and his assistant. After the others leave, the son does the beautifully choreographed victory dance. As it ends, the mother comes out and shoots him. The play deservedly won the best choreography and sound design awards for the director, Ninghthouja Deepak of N.T. Theatre, Imphal.
I liked Ram Ganesh Kamatham’s Dancing on Glass. The two actors, Meghana Mundkur and particularly Abhishekh Majumdar, were excellent and took the theme of struggling with a relationship in the time of the BPO buzz to another level. Abhiskekh’s holding back with Meghna’s raging hormones was brilliantly done. The set design was eloquent and very well used. The other interesting play which the jury bypassed was Red Sparrow by Manav Kaul.
Using his favourite writers Charles Bukowski, Kafka, Nirmal Varma and Vinay Kumar Shukla as characters, Kaul constructs a clever drama of suspense and thrills as devised through the characters from the writings of the dramatis personae by the young writer Anand. Suffering from a writer’s block, Anand invites the writers to be part of the search for the mythical red sparrow. Through situations bizarre, comic and satirical, Kaul takes us on a literary adventurous search for the red sparrow. It becomes clearer what the red sparrow is when it is revealed that the celebrated writer Franz Kafka is the only person who knows its whereabouts.
The play is special for Kaul, who thinks that “the red sparrow has found me this time”.
The selection committee unusually selected two plays by Manav Kaul — Mamtaz Bhai Patang Wale has been seen earlier in Delhi. It is about a young boy Bikki who loves both flying kites and also idolises Mamtaz Bhai. Suddenly one day, he stops flying kites and goes to the extent of setting fire to a kite shop. The play opens on a grown-up Bikki who is asked to visit his village at the behest of Mamtaz Bhai. This play, of teenage love, hate and revenge, has a slim story which is padded up by the village school children and their antics. Bikki‘s sister, played by Tirmala Adhikari, received the best supporting actor (female) award. However, nothing can explain the best actor (female) award for Ahlam Khan who plays a parallel role to Trisha Patel in Aaj Rang Hai. Both play old women and Trishna is the better among the two, in a play that is held together by singing and dancing. It is a celebration of Hazrat Amir Khusrau’s poetry and music and the singers are professional qawwals — Haider Baqsh and group.
Another good work which requires mention is Ambedkar Aur Gandhi, directed by Arvind Gaur and presented by Asmita. As the name suggests, the play is s political dialogue between two stalwarts of the freedom struggle, who had similar aims but different paths. Ambedkar comes across as a stronger person in his attitude towards untouchability. Though Gandhi is nowhere vilified, the balance swerves towards Ambedkar whose anguish at Gandhi’s historic fast is clearly spelt out as undermining the dalits’ fight for a rightful place in society. The debate between Gandhi and Ambedkar is one of equals. What makes the production come alive is the chorus of nearly 40 girls and boys who sing familiar and new songs of freedom with great élan.
The Marathi play Punasccha Honeymoon, written by Sandesh Kulkarni, is an interesting two-hander on a writer’s block which the news reporter wife wishes to remove by revisiting their honeymoon where the writer completed his first successful novel. The two actors — Sandesh Kulkarni and his real wife Amruta Subhash — are both talented players. However, the script is loose and diversionary with too many abstract and dream like situations to hold audience attention. Tichee 17 Prakarne, which won for best direction, best ensemble and lighting portrays 17 aspects of a female protagonist. She can be a terrorist or the girl next door or any other form of womanhood. The brainchild of four writer/directors Alok Rajwade, Nipun Dharmadhikari, Sarang Sathaye and Varun Narvekar, the play which often proceeds in one-liners, is an experiment in the word and its picture on stage. The content is socio-political and while speaking of terrorism does not lose sight of the abstract “woman”.