Science, Superstition, Suicide: This and more at Thespo's 15th Edition
Deepa Punjani
Thespo, the youth theatre festival by Theatre Group, Bombay showcased five plays at its 15th edition (December 10-15 2013) at Prithvi theatre. The festival has certainly grown since its inception in 1999 and has proved to be a magnetic field, attracting youth theatre from across the country. Yet for all the effervescence that accompanies youth theatre in Mumbai (the city has a rich legacy in this variant of theatre that needs to be documented), very few (rare, almost) productions make the mark these days. And, I am not only referring to Thespo but the entire bandwidth of theatre by young people in the city which often finds its beginnings in inter-college competitions. There are various reasons for this; the most obvious being the dearth of imagination, even as ironically, information has never been more readily accessible. Anyway, this would call for a separate and deeper inquiry.
This year's main programme at Thespo featured plays from Mumbai, Pune and Delhi. There were two plays from Pune; both symbiotically linked in that the BMCC College (which presented the award-winning play KABADI UNCUT) also spawned the Natak company, which for the past few years now, has been regularly showing plays at Thespo. This year it presented MI...GHALIB. Mumbai's Mithibai college performed THE E.Q. ; yet another group from Mumbai staged the play 786, while Delhi's Ramjas college showed NORWAY.TODAY.
THE E.Q
The opening play THE E.Q. , written and directed by Amatya Goradia, has Albert Einstein as its subject. The self-explanatory title seeks to delve into the more soft and emotional side of the famous physicist. Einstein's brain, which looks like a big, pink broccoli, is dissected to understand the mind of the maverick genius. Einstein is then split into three -- a very young Einstein who was a late learner, Einstein as a more confident young man, and Einstein, the old man, in the prime of his fame but who also bears the cross of leading the Manhattan Project, making way for an annihilating, nuclear cloud in the wake of WWII. A good subject except that the treatment, including the performances were thoroughly marred by an excessive sentimentality of the Bollywood kind. The youngest Einstein was terrible. Perhaps no fault of the actor, he played his part Bollywood-style as mentally retarded.
If that was not the only blight on what might have made a better play, the production was dreadfully old-fashioned in its execution. Clichès abounded in mannerism, speech and style. The costumes were poor and even the exclamatory 'Fuck' by the chap dissecting Einstein's brain at the end of the play is merely sensational, as if mouthing an otherwise innocuous expletive, is the closest form of belonging and identity the Indian NextGen can aspire to. Mithibai is one of the colleges in the city that has been at the forefront of youth theatre but there is little to prove today the transition that its theatre has made. Its datedness cannot be more emphasised. Young people like Amatya Goradia need to step out of the familiar zones and explore more widely because it's not as if they lack the talent.
786
If hackneyed best describes the production quality of THE E.Q., which was awarded for its 'outstanding new writing' and 'outstanding female actor in a supporting role' (Arushi Saxena), the other Mumbai play 786 was incoherent and dull. Incoherence is fine as a dramatic device but not for a play as a whole. And, that's just one of the problems with 786. Written by Abhishek Pattnaik and directed by Murtuza Kutianawala, the play comprises three separate segments, each dealing with superstition. The first is about a young woman and her obsession with the number 7; the second is about a bus-stop philosophising and being nostalgic about bus no 8 while the last is about a writer and his sixth play. The first segment is pointless in that it depicts the bane of some young people today with their endless obsession with relationships and being new age with wine and pasta; none of it being graceful. The bus-stop segment could have been more productive and worthwhile with its references that could have evoked a soulful sense of the city but it just gets predictable and soppy. The star of the third segment is a eunuch and Abhishek Pattnaik manages to save the act with his performance alone.
KABADI UNCUT
KABADI UNCUT (I like the title and the play stays true to it), which won most of the awards, is a technically sound production with good performances. BMCC college has established a reputation of sorts for successfully creating productions that can easily match and sometimes even outdo the professional play. It's really just nice to see an Indian production that is professionally handled, as this doesn't happen too often. This basic professionalism is part of the nuts and bolts of a show. Everything down to the tiniest speck of garbage that the human eye could see is the landscape of KABADI UNCUT that deals with rag pickers, one of the most marginalized sections of our society. So, there's the potent social issue dealt with a filmi twist in which a documentary filmmaker and his two colleagues befriend a young girl who with her mother makes a living out of collecting and selling thrash. The play, written by Siddhesh Purkar and directed by Suraj Parasnis, has its moments and keeps you involved but apart from the dramatic situations it creates, it merely touches upon the issue without creating any substantial areas of actual engagement. It remains to that extent a sophisticated tearjerker and just a well-mounted production.
MI...GHALIB
MI...GHALIB, directed by the talented Alok Rajwade and written by Omkar Bhutkar (who also plays Ghalib in the play) was actually part of the NCPA Centrestage festival in 2011. It was only when I was watching the play that I had a feeling of déjà vu. I had my reservations when I had first seen the play and those remain. Once again this is a pretty competent production which takes its inspiration from Ghalib's poetry. But in its soul-searching narrative spurred by a young dramatist and which runs parallel to instances from Ghalib's life, it is overly self-indulgent, bringing into question once more the existential crisis that young people find sexy but which is almost, always superficial. Hence relationships appear like the be all and the end all of everything. This obsessive brooding over relationships is ok to reckon with as a natural part of growing-up but to see it as a full-length play, once too many times, can be tiring. The saving grace here was of course Ghalib's poetry which also had some success with the live music and singing in the background.
NORWAY.TODAY
But existentialism can even take on different overtones depending on where you are as NORWAY.TODAY by Swiss writer, director, architect and scenographer Igor Bauersima proves. But in this production, directed by Keshav Moodliar, the content is missed by the context in which it is staged. The play which is about a young couple who comes together to commit suicide, has profounder implications given its original, cultural context of Norway, but in its staging by a group of young urban, college-going Indians, the play immediately begins to look shallow. The kind of issues and the alienation that young people face in advanced societies like Norway, not to mention its climatic conditions in which winters can be cold, long and lonely, are simply not the same for a young person in India. So it's imperative to be sensitive about these obvious and even the subtler cultural connotations while staging such a play, otherwise it is simply not going to connect. Secondly, if one chooses to 'play' with the script as this group has done (they have six actors for the original two-member cast and have modified the original script), one had better be equipped for the creative liberty taken and that's not quite the case here. The actors are by and large strictly average in their performances and while a few compositions from a visual point of view are clever, it doesn't add up. The words remain distant and elusive.
INVISIBLE CITY
If I experienced some really good moments at Thespo this year, I found them in a couple of Fringe performances that I was able to see prior to the main shows. I was impressed by INVISIBLE CITY, which was based on five stories by Italo Calvino and which was staged by Mitee-Chaar, a group from Kalyan. Not only were the stories well-translated into Marathi by Ashwajeet Kamble, the performance by all the actors displayed a degree of maturity, which was evident even in details like the stage design, lights and costumes. A guitarist sat in a corner strumming the notes, and the simple but very effective music accentuated the stories. This was all the more laudable given the cramped space of Prithvi House where at least there were eight actors if not more at one time together in a few scenes. Thespo should consider giving the production (directed by Lalit Prabhakar) an opportunity to be staged at one of its Thespo @ Prithvi showings.
I DANCE FOR BANANAS comprises three Spanish one-acts and has been directed by Barbara Anderlic, a young Slovenian director, who was invited by Thespo to conduct a workshop. The production emerged from the workshop, and as a result, not all the actors were able to deliver. But apart from the acting, all three one-acts were very good and Barbara's simple yet efficient design was able to give dimensions to the various characters, which otherwise are meant for one actor to play out. I would be happy to see a more refined version of this little production too.
Thespo offers the much-needed platform to young people interested in theatre. Its dedicated founders are themselves the product of youth theatre and they take great pride in running their festival against all odds. They have managed to keep running the show with collective efforts like 'Friends of Thespo'. With their expertise and resources in taking the festival across the country, they could perhaps mentor play readings which are cost-effective and which could involve young people from outside the cities. They could also consider a panel of experts from different parts of the country who could help their screening committee members make more discerning choices. Also given the sheer scale of our country and its multiple pluralities, it helps to engage a local expert/s. That would not only make their job easier but would make their choices more focused, perhaps more relevant, and would also make the festival more Pan-Indian than it currently is. More power to them.
