The annual Old World Theatre festival at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi featured some IHA favourites like Manav Kaul and Rahul De Cunha’s Rage Productions, which had the who’s who of the Mumbai stage in it. Some new faces at the festival were Dr S.M. Azhar Aalam with a Hindi/Urdu play Chehre about a grandmother who, like Lorca’s Bernarda Alba, holds her family of two daughters and two granddaughters in her iron grip. An adaptation of Tony Devany Morinelli’s play The Sins of Mothers. Commissioned for three Irish ladies, it is cast here in a Muslim milieu. The other new face is that of Bijon Mondal who presented the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex in Urdu and Hindi.
It was a pleasure to catch up on Lushin Dubey’s Salaam India based on Pavan K. Verma’s Being Indian, adapted by Nicholas Khargaonkar. It is not easy to adapt a book of ideas and not get bogged down in abstractions, a fate which Salaam India escaped. When the play began, I did not for a moment recognise the booming voice as Lushin’s, playing a militant lower middle class character. The three actors on stage with her were Shena Gamat, Ashish Palival and Andrew Hoffman, all very accomplished theatre artistes, but not able to summon the same expertise in speech inflections, accents and character makeover that Lushin has perfected through her solo performances.
The four actors play 16 characters, from slum-dwellers to middle-class Indians. The poorest of the poor are driven by basic needs and yet seem to have a happy-go-lucky attitude towards life. The householders are more worried about their homes and neighbours come together to sort out their common problems of dealing with the lower order bureaucracy; to bribe or not and if there is a compulsion involved, how much? For despite your contacts, you know the bribe will have to be paid.
Is it correct to marry a man who asks for money on the day of the wedding even if this is the last chance of married life for you? This is the situation with the girl (played superbly by Lushin) who is marrying a colleague. First, it is the honeymoon expenses then it comes to cash and demands keep mounting. The girl’s family is willing to bear the cost. The girl is already 34-year-old. She asks for the telephone and calls the police. Shena Gamat came into her own as a Parsi member of the parliamentary committee which is set up to find a national dish (as in food) for India. Her Parsi accent was as good as Lushin’s Bengali and Andrew’s pseudo Amricanese which moved seamlessly to Punjabi in this sequence. Ashish played the little bureaucrat, who keeps the flag flying for his community, well. Not having read the book, it is difficult to ask why problems were so simplified in the script. However, the four actors, wearing simple black tunics and pyjamas, moved effortlessly through the characters and the descriptions of evolving India.

Manav Kaul’s
layered play

Manav Kaul’s Mamtaz Bhai Patang Waale is a layered script that appears simple like his past works Peela Scooter Wala, Shakkar ke Panch Daane etc. Bikki is now a grown man settled in Mumbai. One fine morning, he receives a phone call from his village that Mamtaz Bhai is very unwell and is asking for Bikki. Cancelling plans made with his wife and his pals, he leaves for the village. In flashbacks, we learn of his craze for flying kites, of how he is beaten by his mother for wasting money and time on kites. One day, he suddenly gives up kites and takes to marbles. No one knows why. Though still excited when he sees a kite falling he does not rush to get it.
This happens when Bikki hears that his hero Mamtaz Bhai is married and has a daughter. Now, why should that lead him to burn Mamtaz’s shop after destroying it, is the mystery that provides the play an edge. Does he see Mamtaz Bhai as something not of this world and therefore not involved in plebeian things like marriage? Does he see him as a farishta, an angel, just sent for him alone? Bikki gives up kite flying and takes to marbles instead. As Mamtaz remarks: “Straight from the sky to the ground”! Not that kites do not excite him anymore. He still gets up when he sees a kite falling, but does not run after it.
Bikki senior is restless and insists he smells burning in the area. When Mamtaz Bhai goes off to arrange kites they can fly, Bikki’s guilt takes over and he slinks away; he is made aware of the fact that he has ruined Mamtaz Bhai’s life, something he will never recover from — the loss of his shop. Will Bikki recover from his guilt ever?
Manav Kaul uses stylisation sometimes for effect and other times as integral parts of the production. He uses the orderly human line dissolving into a crowd as a devise to put brackets on scenes. The school scenes are the gaps and are points of change. The two Bikkis are present together in crucial scenes like when Mamtaz Bhai comes to his home to enquire about Bikki. The elder Bikki plays the inner voice, but even that is not sure of his decisions. There is a certain rhythm in the production rare to come by in theatre.

RAGE PRODUCTIONS’
ONE ON ONE

Definitely the finest offering at the festival, One On One featured some superb talent from Mumbai in nine crisp 10-minute plays. Mostly original scripts, the content was contemporary issues like inedible airlines food, load shedding, the problems faced by people who leave their small towns to find their dreams in large cities. In fact, one of the most poignant play was Abodaana, written by Purva Naresh, directed by well-known actor Aakash Khurana. Both the actors, Preetika Chawla and Anand Tewari, get under the skin of the two lonely souls in a big city trying to come to terms with an altered lifestyle and subsequent changed aspirations while making tentative efforts to lose loneliness.
Anand Tewari is a multifaceted actor. His monologue Load Shedding sitting atop an electric pole in Bandra, written by Nadir Shah and directed by Farhad Sohrbjee, is a caustic satire on the political parties and their inefficiency, waffling over decisions, delay in completing projects, all delivered with such humour and hilarity, Anand soon had the audience eating out of his hands.

Kunal Roy Kapur’s
The Bureaucrats

The Bureaucrats, written by Anuvab Pal and directed by Kunal Roy Kapur, has Bug Bhargava Krishna playing a 63-year-old Civil Servant who lives his life through the eyes of two juniors, the 43-year-old Neil Bhoopalam and the 23-year-old Anand Tewari, in 10 minutes. With humour and wit, he paints a vivid picture of the last four decades of changing India.
Rahul de Cunha writes and directs two solo performances: Hello Check about a socially ambitious housewife’s meeting with the media where she gushingly describes her achievements as a social activist and as a socialite, brilliantly enacted by Anu Menon, and the bizarre confessions of a terrorist of why he hates his compatriot Ajmal Kasav in Instant Behosh and how he is sure to feature in The Boss number four, played with a deft light touch by Amit Mistry. Bash, also adapted by Rahul, is a strange tale told by a married couple from Pune (Neil Bhoopalam and Preetika Chawla completely different from Aabodaana) which begins happily and ends on a tragic note. It comments on the moral policing by individuals. Here, three friends descend on a homosexual and kill him for his sexual preference.
The others involved in the writer’s workshop, which resulted in many of the plays featured beside Rahul de Cunha, are Rajit Kapur and Shernaz Patel who gave thrilling solo performances. Dear Richard, Rajit Kapur’s complaint to Richard Branson on the food served of the flight on his virgin airlines, illustrated with large photographs of the said food, is an absolutely hilarious exposition in English. Using Hindi in Kachre Ki Hifaazat, Rajiv comes up winners again in this delicately humorous satire on politicians and their servers: The bodyguard dies of a mysterious illness after being bitten by his boss the chief minister.
Shernaz Patel has a tough role in Creado, Constance, directed and adapted by Arghya Lahiri. She plays a 54-year-old widow who reads for the old and infirm, is hesitant when she gets an offer to read to a blind boy younger than her son. The boy’s unseeing green eyes disturb her and she finds herself unreasonably dressing up for the blind boy. One day, he asks her to read an explicit sexual scene. At first embarrassed, she is moved by his passion when he penetrates her on top of the dining table. The questions she asks herself and the reassurance she offers are hurrahs for feminists.