This year, once again, the NSD is showing its talented graduate students in a festival of five plays at the NSD’s Abhimanch and Bahumukh auditoriums from August 10-15. Even if the plays attain a fraction of the excellence of last year’s graduate productions, it will be an achievement not just for the NSD, but for theatre per se. The images from last year’s Andha Yug, Trojan Women and Rang Abhang are still etched in memory. It has been very brave of this national institution of performing arts to let the graduating class to come to terms with an audience when they are still wet behind the ears. These trends indicate the high standards of teaching and confidence of the NSD staff. One only wishes that the NSD had separate shows for the enthusiastic students, because there are many people who would enjoy this new theatre. The two plays — An Autobiography of a Devil and Great Expectations — staged at the NSD on August 10 and 11 respectively were packed, with not a single vacant seat.
An Autobiography of a Devil, based on three short stories by the famous Telugu writer K.A.Y. Patanjali, staged on the opening night, was a visual delight. The play has animals as characters that enact the three stories. Framing the stories are the Devil and Gandharva who meet in the forest. The Devil has come in search of a quiet place to write his autobiography. Gandharva, after minimising the intellectual, declares that he and his peacock have come to the forest to eat the intoxicating mohua flower. He also tries to dissuade the Devil from writing his autobiography as he says that without experience knowledge is nothing and it is not worthwhile writing a book in self-praise.
The arguments on knowledge, experience and intellectual prowess give rise to three stories. The first story, narrated by the Devil, is about a talented parrot that can sing and dance. She lives happily in the forest until a tom cat comes along. He declares himself to be an intellectual. In his scheme of things, there can be no life in the arts. The poor parrot tries to convince him by demonstrating some dance movements. In a beautiful sequence, the cat tries to imitate the parrot, but looks amusing doing so. After a diatribe against arts and praise for the intellectual, who is the source of all knowledge, he kills the parrot. It is also symbolic of the victory of bad over good.
The next story, narrated by Gandharva, is about a turtle tribe that throws up a scientist who can measure the area of land, the depths of water and can deduce the body weight of the turtles by measuring their length and breadth. When the king asks, “How many fish do I eat in a day?” by a simple calculation of his body weight and the amount of work the king does in a day, he comes to the correct answer of 15. The happy king makes him his special advisor. The scientist soon comes up with a plan of getting more space for the growing turtle tribe by attacking neighbouring tailless Monkey tribe. The attack is a debacle with the monkeys turning the turtles over and attacking their vulnerable underside. So the argument that the intellectuals are superior gets a beating.
The third story, told by the Gandharva, regards a crab that in his researches discovers how the length of the tip of the tail to the head, which he called topi could be used as a measure. Now all the crabs started creating their own topis, leading to chaos. By further meditation the crab came up with the fact that he could tell him direction from which the sun rose and set which becomes erroneous in the hands of the crabs as they face any direction and declare it the north. The old crab is lynched for misleading them. Once again half-baked knowledge as truth is decried.
Director Shiva, who hails from Andhra Pradesh, and has studied Theatre Arts at the Hyderabad Central University, did a marvellous job with the text. From the costumes (Firoz, Ritu) to music (Anjali) and lighting (Prashant), everything was in sync. Shiva’s stage design was efficient as his handling of actors amongst whom the devil played by Shahjahan and Ajit as Gandharva were outstanding.
The play the next day (August 11) was a very ambitious venture; Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. To capture the essence of this classic novel is difficult as was attempted in 90 minutes: To reproduce the range and depth of the characters and scope of Dickens’ imagination is nigh impossible. It is creditable that young Swati Mittal (script, design and direction) made the attempt. By introducing the main character, Pip, with an alter ego, Swati managed to capture the depth of the character as written to a certain extent, but there were smudged lines where the alter ego forgot his role and made physical interventions.
The stage design was functional, but not reflective of the times while the costumes pretty well echoed the epoch. The action raised too much sand and the fancy home of Miss Havisham was not there to speak of. In fact, Miss Havisham herself was not much in character, neither in dress nor performance. There is a problem with the NSD plays. Since the students come from different parts of India, and all the plays are in Hindi, there is no conformity of speech. Some actors take the job seriously and create their special pronunciation to Hindi and quite successfully too. Those who do not make the effort suffer as long as they are acting in NSD.
So once again it was Shahjahan from the Hindi-speaking belt that was cast as Pip and stole the show. Ipshita, as Pip’s sister and as the Parrot in the previous play, is a promising actress. Ritu, as the heartless Estelle and Pip’s everlasting fantasy, was effective. The idea of having the story move backwards through flashbacks was a good idea as Swati took vignettes from the novel. Some of the scenes were effective like Pip’s meeting with his benefactor who turns out to be the escaped convict he helps against his will as a child. Pip’s snobbery as a grown man living in London is not well-etched in the production. In contrast to his childhood as an orphan living with his older sister and her husband. Swati Mittal has still much to learn about stagecraft.