Mumbai is probably the single most theatre active location in the country. And while it has always been the bastion of Gujarati and Marathi plays, of late the number of new English and Hindi plays has also multiplied. New shows open almost every week; some commercial, some non-commercial.
The problem with having such an active theatre scene is that creators are suddenly on the lookout for things that will make plays. Movies no longer have the appeal that they used to for producers, because sooner or later the film will be re-run on one of the gazillion movie channels we have. So the more recent trend is to look towards literature.
This has usually been restricted to only children’s plays with Life of Pi, Ruskin Bond’s short stories, Enid Blyton renditions, etc. all being given a “dramatic” form. And, of course, short stories of Munshi Premchand, Ismat Chugtai and Sadat Hasan Manto have dominated the Mumbai stage for quite a while. But the new trend is to bring novels to life.
AKvarious recently opened a stage version of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which was very well received. Mahesh Dattani-directed Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist, which has been running successfully for the last year or so. Pritesh Sodha and Sananda Mukhopadhyay are about to put on stage versions of Kafka stories. And most recently GRM Productions’ opened Tipping Point, based on Malcom Gladwell’s book of the same name. In commercial terms this makes sense — there is a ready audience as people who love the books are intrigued to see the play version. It also means that the audience is wonderfully receptive, looking forward to high dramatic moments and certain words and phrases strongly associated with the book. But there is also the risk of the play never living up to the book; trying to populate a world and a verbose imagery onto a static stage. That is the challenge and the beauty. In the past many a play has tried to fully stage a novel and fallen short. Lengthy descriptive monologues don’t make for exciting staging, and multiple set changes only break the narrative.
Perhaps the more effective way of going from Page to Stage is to re-interpret the novel for theatre. Recently New York-based actor Sorab Wadia brought down a one man telling of the Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. This was a simple performance with no extra trappings like set or even other actors. He played many parts and the stage only had a small stool. His was almost a dramatic narration of the novel, and the lack of visual set allowed the audiences imagination to create their own image of Afghanistan and have direct access to Hosseini’s words.
In the same vein Tipping Point, which is due to play next week at Prithvi, is not a staging of the book but rather a reinterpretation. It only uses the novel as a starting point and then takes off on its own narrative. Set in the future, the play looks at where our workaholic lives and our obsession for online identity are likely to take us. We follow Agent G35 and his organic computer (made up of four fantastic actors) as they have “proxy” conversations on behalf of people with their loved ones.
The play, funny in some parts yet deadly serious in others, asks some important questions about where we, as a society, are headed. But what is unique about the play is the way these questions are presented. It’s fun, dynamic, energetic and quite exciting. Using elements of dance, movement and even acrobatics the computer comes to life, becoming a restaurant when two characters are on a date, giving new meaning to the phrase “cyber café”.
Maybe this is the future of stage adaptations of books; where the book is only the seed, and not the whole tree.