The NSD graduate p production threw up some intereting works. Firoz Khan tackled the short novel Pedro Paramo by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo with imagination. Adapted and directed by Firoz, the novel comes into the category of magical realism. A young man is sent by his mother to Comala to find his father and make him pay or
all the years he kept us out of his mind. Comala is a city of the dead. An abandoned city where everyone is in the grave but is still living. They commune with each other, narrate their stories, live, kill and love.
The boy finds his father Pedro Paramo (well played by Sanjay Kumar Singh) but before that he meets his brother Albundlo enacted by Riken Ngomie from Nagaland who is one of the few to have adapted his speech well to Hindi. This gives him a chance of displaying his extraordinary talent to advantage in this and other plays.
This non-linear narrative proceeds in incidents that are complete in themselves, yet bear a relationship to each other as they concern the same characters. Despair and melancholy mark the text. The love stories re also tragic. No one gets true love and if some one does he/she looses the beloved. When Susana dies, Pedro is lost; he sits in a chair, slowly disintegrates and dies.
Susan is obviously a symbol as she is also the love of t he narrator. To handle a novel of such textual complexity and so many intertwining stories teeming with characters is not easy. Firoz Khan did a marvellous job in trying to bring the novella to life; that he succeeded to an extent was due to the performances.
Ritu Sharma’s Dolores the mother was sensitively done and the costumes by her were effective. Jaggannath as her son, Papri Medhi as Susana, Ashish Pathode as Miguel (Perdro’s son)and, not to forget, Shahjahan as Fr. Renteria all contributed in full measure.
Reshmi Rumal, based on Shakespeare’s Othello, is cast in the style of a rehearsal where the private and the public lives of the actors clash. For this genre, there is nothing to match Roysten Able’s Ohello in Black and White. It is a brilliant script carefully written, directed and superbly enacted. Reshmi Rumal (written by Dr Rakesh Soni) refers to the handkerchief which Othello gives to his wife Desdemona and is spirited away by Iago with help from Emilia, his wife and Desdemona’s nurse. Iago, the villain, uses the handkerchief to make Othello so jealous that he kills his wife.
By and large, the play, directed by Prashant Parmar, appeared badly under-rehearsed. Maybe this is due to the paucity of acting talent in the class of 2010 for male leads. The female leads were played by Ipshita (Neha) and Ritu (Priya) in most of the productions. Or it could be because Prashant did the lighting for three of the five productions. There is no doubt that he is an ace at lighting. His work in Hamlet Machine and Autobiography of a Devil was classy.
Hamlet Machine is a complex play written by the complex mind of erstwhile East German playwright Heiner Muller. An iconoclast, Muller challenged the police communist state through his writing. A leading light of the German Writer’s Association, Muller fell from grace when the authority banned his play The Resettler Woman. Hamlet Machine was also not allowed performance and was first staged in Brussels. Heiner theatre was lauded in West Berlin where he soon became a celebrity. The East German authorities tried to appease Muller by making him the president of the Academy of the Arts and also made him a director in the Berliner Ensemble. Muller was the leading playwright of Germany and though there was no obvious likeness between him and Brecht, Muller was the natural successor of Brecht.
Hamlet Machine is not so much a play as text for performance, rife with images and ideas. Director Anjali Shinde (Patil) explores this complex work of tension and stress, of contradictions and conflicts with imagination and élan. She creates amazing visuals bold and daring in her flight of reflection. Shakespeare’s characters are symbolic of the angst against the communist regime of a failed revolution and of the options offered by consumerism capitalism: Ophelia, with all other women, represents the ravages of revolution; Gertrude and Horatio are in the bottom of the pit of degradation; Claudius’ ugliness arises from his usurpation of the Danish crown; Hamlet who is divested of power and as victimised as the rest and as engulfed in the horrors round him, tries to find a comforting role maybe as a girl. These are but a partial explanation of the characters that are complex creations of a provocative mind with paradoxical and stimulating thoughts and visuals.
The translation and adaptation in Hindi, by Manavendra Kumar Tripathy, was very good and a deep understanding of the text marked his performance as Hamlet. Manavendra’s playing of the girl was a coup de theatre. The rest of the cast played well in ensemble. The lighting by Prashant were suitably good. Basically, however, the credit for excellent theatre must go to Anjali Shinde (Patil) whose design and direction was the best seen among this year’s graduate productions.