Akademi fest offers dated yet realistic and symbolic narrative

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Amongst the Sangeet Natak Akademi annual awardees for theatre in 2011 was Banwari Taneja, the actor who began his career with B.M. Shah’s Trishnku, in which I also acted. He was a young man very keen to make it big but at the same time he was a delightful and generous person.

It was a pleasure to watch him grow as an actor; he was truly brilliant in Laila Majnu as the father of Kais, alias Majnu. That is the play which should have been staged at the SNA festival honouring the awardees instead of Tyagpatra, a dated and dry narrative. Adapted from the eponymous novel written by Jainendra Jain in 1937, the meandering story about the love between an aunt (Bua) and the protagonist, with long monologues delivered by Banwari as the narrator, did not do justice to his talent,
Urmil Kumar Thapaliyal from Lucknow received the award for direction.
The choice of the play to showcase his talent was unfortunate; Habib Tanvir’s Bahadur Kalarin achieved iconic status with the legendary Fida Bai playing the titular role. Even today the memory of the performance brings a shiver of delight .The quiet strength of Fida who makes liquor in the village hence “kalarin” was to be seen to be believed, here was a poor woman left with her son who does not know who his father is, living alone in the village fighting attempts by males to marry her and as a sort of bar-girl always up in arms against the attention she receives from her clients.
But that is not the cause of worry for her. It is her son who is completely besotted by her. She arranges 126 marriages for her son but the boy still comes back to his mother. This sequence was beautifully done with bastar dancers on poles coming to be married and disappearing all the marriage were conducted through the course of one song. This symbolism was dragged into realistic marriages by Thapaliyal where the women all stay with the boy; the bickering wives was really poor theatre.
The transference of the Chhattisgarhi tale of Oedipus complex did not work in the Hindi-Awadhi version.
Though Thapaliyal wove in the character of the King as Bahadur’s lover and in the first half there was the young Bahadur as a flighty young thing believing the king’s promise to return to her within a few months.
To complete the Oedipus tale he also has the boy kill his father, the King then becomes the head of the village and harasses the peasants. The play did not work because there was no restraint in any portrayal. It was sheer melodrama. There must have been some good music, but the orchestra and the singers were so poorly balanced that it became cacophony.
Aadhe Adhure by Mohan Rakesh is now considered a modern Indian classic. The language is extraordinary in its dramatic structure, lashing and hurting, sharp and direct, with potent silences; it is a departure from dramatic writing of the past. The characters take birth from a certain observed reality in a section of the middle-class. To universalise this phenomenon is to take away credence from he limited reality portrayed. There is Savitri, the disgruntled woman who tries to escape from her dismal married life but eventually has to return to her useless husband Mahendranath who is jobless and hated by Savitri. Their son Ashok is a chip of the old block and does nothing but cuts picture of films stars all the day.
The elder daughter Binna is married to Manoj who was basically Savitri‘s friend. She has returned to the house with questions for her mother, Kinni is the school-going daughter who is influenced by the environment has become a precocious rebel.
Lillete Dubey’s Aadhe Adhure presented by Old World Culture in the Habitat’s Stein auditorium on Saturday is one of the several productions of the play one has seen including the very first production.
This was during Mohan’s lifetime when he collaborated with Om Shivpuri who directed and acted in the play along with his wife Sudha Shivpuri who played the pivotal role of Savitri with an intensity which was her hallmark style. It was this “on the verge of bursting” intensity, which was missing from Lillete’s performance. It was sheer magic when Surekha and Uttara Baokar as Binni were on stage.
The first show of the play was electrifying. The language was searing. Each word correctly placed for the effect of a whiplash as it slashed the silences so carefully woven in. Its content was observed reality of a section of the middle-class. To treat this reality as a universal truth would question the very credibility of the selected theme and its dramatic personae, the concept of an unalterable/ unchanging world order “even if the circumstances change I will remain the same” (prologue) also appears rather unaccountable the moment it is taken beyond the immediate situation in the play.
The man in the black suit plays all the male characters in the play. He is the groin-scratching lecherous Singhania, Savitri’s boss. He is Jagmohan, the sophisticated bank manager who was in love with Savitri, whose arrival back in town has given Savitri hope of reprieve from this horrible existence. He is also Joneja, Mahedranath’s friend who comes to Savitri to ask her to release Mahendranath. During the acrimonious dialogue he goes on to expose Savitri as a woman never satisfied with her lot and therefore flitting from man to man in search of something; love, money, status.
He narrates how she came to him when he was the “someone”, placed her head on his shoulder and asked to be taken away. He correctly explains how when she met Jagmohan earlier in the evening, she must have regretted the past and begged him to save her life and she was willing to go anywhere with him and how he must have been kinky and put her off with an excuse of a family problem.
What Rakesh does not clarify is the nature of the relationships Savitri has with the men. Is it sexual? If it is, one can understand the breakdown of the marriage and also the complaints over Mahendranath’s violent behaviour made by Binni and Savitri and accepted as true by Joneja.
All the men — Om Shivpuri, Manohar Singh — in the Allana’s NSD version and Mohan Agashe in this production, have done well in their disparate roles, Agashe brought a rare lightness to the play. He conjured a smile even when reciting the prologue. He was truly animated in the opening mutually accusative repartee with his wife and children. Ashok played by Rajeev Sidhartha and Binni by Ira Dubey were both efficient. The sets, ambience, lighting and direction were all neat and in the groove.