New groups are coming up in Delhi almost by the day. Few survive the year. Some carry on as a name, sans activity. Several of them make a promising start and then wither away in a year or so. Many lose track of the aims and ideals with which they started and begin to compromise on their commitment. After a couple of years of sticking to their guns of doing committed theatre, they discover it does not pay. People are not interested in any serious stuff. They would much rather see their filmi or TV hero and better still, in flesh and blood. To make a success, they try to rope in stars for their plays. Then comes the desire to please the audience. To “entertain”. And the stuff they deliver is as mindlessly decadent or glitzy sexy as a saas-bahu saga or a B-grade film.
In this scenario, there is the Actor Factor Theatre Company, a group which has been active for three-and-a-half years and staged six plays. Each play is different in content, according to the director Sunit Sinha, but with the same aim to get a message across to the audience. The message, he says, is never direct: “We just want to convey an idea, a thought for the audience to ponder. For example, The Indian Wants the Bronx (English) dealt with racism in America, Aakaar (Hindi) dealt with individual “angst”. Three, a collection of three comedies, is a “set of morality plays,” says Sunit.
The Red Corridor and Premchand’s Kafan are two other dramas the group has played, besides The Leela Tapes that I saw at the Habitat Centre on Friday.
The company is apparently here to stay. It also organises two theatre workshops annually. One is for the beginners and the other for the experienced actors. The workshop leaders are usually well-known theatrepersons from India or abroad. Given the fees charged and the numbers, these activities obviously help to make up the deficit even if Sunit avers to the contrary. The company does not pay the actors and has made up the deficit and is in the green after just nine shows of The Leela Tapes. Sunit Sinha is an autodidact. He began theatre as a school boy in Patna. On coming to Delhi in 1991, he worked with Jan Natya Manch, ACT ONE and some progressive directors. Like others before him and those who will follow, Sunit went to Mumbai to chase a dream. For five years, he struggled and did TV and theatre to keep the body and soul together. Creditably, on returning to Delhi, he and some like-minded people formed the Actor Factor Theatre Company.
The Leela Tapes, by Shashank Gupta, is a reasonably dramatic script written with good theatre sense. Crafted as a mystery, it holds up in the suspense department. For more than half the play, one does not know who the woman is and what she is doing in Victoriaganj Central Jail. Who is this irascible man Adrian Pillai? Why is he in jail? What is she doing in trying to interview this man when he is so recalcitrant? The build-up to the initial meetings increases the mystery. This is entirely due to the directorial design. Sunit has five Adrian Pillais. They are all bald and clad in black three quarter pants and black half-sleeved kurtis. They come as a chorus in between the interview depicting the mood of the past or the next meeting with the woman.
The lighting (Arnab Das) and the sound (Shashwat Srivastava) designs add to the effect. For instance, just with effects four Pillais create the image of a fight in the jail. The image of blood is complex. On the one hand it depicts Leela’s daughter Lajja’s fear of the colour red. And as Pillai taunts Leela: What will happen when Lajja gets her periods? And, of course, the sexual connotations of blood are obvious as the subject of the plot is rape.
The play builds up with a steady gait. First, we discover who the woman is. Leela is a widow whose husband disappeared and was declared dead. Is she searching for him in jails, asks Pillai? The two play a cat-and-mouse game with each other as Pillai gets the better of Leela when he sends her on a wild goose chase: to look for his red notebook in someone else’s house. The denouement is a damp squid and therefore overly dramatised. Leela has apparently been raped by the neighbour, an act to which Lajja is witness. Leela wants revenge. And has been pursuing Pillai because he is a homosexual and in jail for sodomising a young boy. Having discovered that his term in jail is going to be soon over, Leela wants Pillai to rape the man who raped her.
But for the end which is a sad let-down after the delightful build-up, the play held interest. Two women play Leela, one is the interviewer and the other talks about her past and present, that includes a mother who is wary of three women living in “a glass house”, and an 11-year-old daughter Lajja. Both the actresses, Vaishali Chakravarty as the first and Mehek Punjabi as the narrator, were clear in their annunciation which is so important in a wordy play. That Vaishali had to play Durga in a violent dance was unfortunate. There could have been a less obvious way to depict the denouement.
Of the five actors playing Pillai, only one was absolutely clear in speech. He was the one who spoke Tamil in an anguished mood. The others, especially the short jocular Pillai, were not totally comprehensible. Whilst black is the dominant mood, there are moments of delicious irony whenever Pillai plays with Leela’s stiff-necked prudery. Sunit Sinha’s direction is able and smart. His design is creative, yet concise. It counters the wordiness of the script.