Ashwath Bhatt is celebrating the centenary year of Saadat Hasan Manto with year-long festivities. He has conceived a play Ek Mulaqaat Manto Se with which he is travelling all over India after successful shows in Pakistan, Germany, France and England.
In a stirring solo performance given at the Tadpole Theatre space in Panchsheel Park, Bhatt regretted the fact that people speak about Manto without reading him. They are titillated by the fact that he was hauled up by the courts for his so called licentious writing.
Using excerpts from the texts — “Manto, main afsana kyun kar likhta hoon, khol do, kal sawere jo meri ankh khuli and deewaroon pe likhna,” Bhatt tries to show how the tragedy of partition affected Manto. Why does Manto write? To which Manto has this to say, “I do not write stories they write me”.
His pockets are always full of stories that dictate the time they are to be written and then it is a painless affair as the writing comes automatically while he is busy with his daily chores.
Bhatt’s rendering of the story Khol Do, which had created such a furore, is very effective. It is a sad tale of a father who loses his only daughter during the partition.
His search for her in camps is futile. He requests eight young men serving as volunteers in the camp to look for his beautiful Sakina who has a mole on her cheek. They find her the next day but she only shows up at the camp after several days. The old man goes to see her. The doctor asks his assistant, “khidki khol do”, and the almost lifeless girl opens her salwar as soon as she hears the word “khol do”.
The satirical touch is Manto’s writing is visible in his description of a morning spent on the streets of post-partition Lahore but even this is marked by the humanism that Manto’s writings present. Besides his rich voice in impeccable Urdu and his supple body, Bhatt cleverly uses Begum Akhtar’s ghazals in the performance to create the ambience of the period and highlight the pathos of Manto’s life.
Ubo Roi
The NSD final year students presented Alfred Jarry’s (1873-1907) play Ubo Roi at a newly-constructed open-air space in the school grounds. Ubo Roi was first performed in 1896 in France. This wild symbolic farce, a sort of Rabelaisian parody of Oedipus Rex, savagely attacking bourgeois complacency and placing before its audience a crude violent image of the world as reflected in the activities of the monstrous tyrant Ubo the bourgeois who crowns himself the king had a scandalous success. Alfred Jarry is considered the progenitor of the Theatre of the Absurd. In his writings he elaborated “the science of imaginary solutions which symbolically attribute the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments”. This idea has been very influential among French intellectuals and is at the root of the Theatre of the Absurd.
In his production of Ubo Roi with the final year students of the NSD, Deepan SIvaraman brings his vast experience as a scenographer in the creation of a stunning design. The audience and the players are all in an open prison. We are sitting on benches on four sides inside a barbed wire enclosure which is illuminated by typical prison lights. So we are also part of the society that produces horrors like Ubo!
Ubo shockingly establishes his crude and vulgar character in his first entry. To see him eating his own excreta is not that disgusting the next time. However, it is chilling to see him torture his victims with some freshly delivered faeces. The killing of the President and his wife done in an inventive manner.
Pieces of wet red cloth is vigorously thrown at great speed at them by a mob of people until they succumb. At the exit and entry points are two large corrugated iron gates on each side of the performing space.