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It's been 17 years since Thespo, the youth theatre festival, organised and managed by QTP, and the erstwhile Theatre Group, Bombay, has encouraged and engaged young people in theatre. These young people have to be under twenty-five to participate in the festival. Not only that, the interested participants have to go through a process, before their plays may be selected for the main programme of the festival. Five plays are selected each year and young people from across the country can participate. These five plays are then judged by a panel of theatre experts. A prize giving ceremony takes place on the last day of the festival.
The festival has grown from strength to strength over the years, and has emerged as the only festival of its kind in the country dedicated to theatre by young people. With its regular programming at Prithvi theatre in Mumbai (Thespo @ Prithvi), the festival ensures that deserving groups that have been part of the festival, will have the opportunity to even stage their plays later. Quite a few young theatre people in Mumbai and Pune especially, have cut their teeth at the festival, and have grown to be established theatre people in their own right.
This year, apart from the various events planned around the festival, which included platform and fringe performances, as well as an international component (Italian Daniele Bartolini staged his show THE STRANGER while Glenn Hayden from Australia and his team of young Indian actors put up a performance called STIMULATED VOICES), the five main plays were CHITTHI (from Pune), LASSANWALA (from Mumbai), HERO (from Pune), TOY (from Kolkata) and DASTAAN-E-BHOOKH (from Delhi).
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CHITTI and LASSANWALA |
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CHITTHI, in Marathi, written and directed by Apurva Bhilare, is a small, delightful play about a rural, unlettered woman anxiously trying to decipher the contents of a letter delivered for her husband. It has a simple theme focused on education but its manner and style are clever and funny. Performances by all its cast members are very good.
The effortless performances and the ability to maintain a tight structure in spite of the simple themes could also be observed in the Hindi play LASSANWALA, written by Vidit Tripathi and directed by Hemant Pandey. This play took the issue of caste as its mainstay and through its central character, the Lassanwala (a garlic grower and seller) commented on the caste-based, discriminatory attitudes that are still prevalent in the country. The Lassanwala emerges a wiser man at the end of the play.
While CHITTHI and more particularly LASSANWALA approached their themes a little too simplistically and to that extent superficially, both productions nonetheless, were well-meaning, honest and endearing. Compared to these two productions, HERO and TOY, in spite of their good intentions, were wanting.
HERO, written by Chinmay Kulkarni, and directed by Ajinkya Mane, started off well, but its theme on the superstar appeal in Bollywood (read Amitabh Bachhan adulation) is not new, and in many ways, overdone. In spite of the innocent, wide-eyed attraction to the distant and glamorous world of Bollywood from our village 'hero's' perspective, the play became long drawn, predictable and sentimental.
TOY was inspired by a short story, written by well-known Bengali radical writer Nabarun Bhattacharya, but was unable to convey the story's philosophical and existential underpinnings about childhood. Its use of Hindi, English and Bengali together, was also problematic in terms of the actors' enunciation. Its set design was imaginative but its engagement with the story was awkward, and in the final scene, it merely became a pretty, visual set piece, and its imagery was somewhat lost.
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DASTAAN-E-BHOOKH |
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The last play of the festival, DAASTAN-E-BHOOKH, I was glad to note, won the best award for its script. In my opinion, it was the best play among the five plays, even though it is imperfect. The play with its titular motif of hunger has a sardonic playfulness that parodies consumption. In a country, increasingly driven by consumerism, the play strikes a resonant note with its characters from a North Indian family comprising the father, mother, son and daughter. Their economic stratum is not quite clear, and this is one of the many loose ends of the production although the characterisation in its own turn is interesting. Other characters such as the lawyer and the bar owner are material to the story and the lawyer is particularly caricatured.
The underlying trajectory of hunger epitomised by the refrigerator is an effective device as the characters keep returning to it. Bigger points about land - the land that offers food and sustenance, but which is lost to ''development'' in India echo a biting truth, but seem muddled up in the course of the play. There is a satire of Bollywood too in the play's stylisation but even as the play's approach in terms of its staging and intent is refreshing, there are discrete elements that are not wholly realised.
Nonetheless experimentation of this nature is vital for our theatre and this is why a festival like Thespo must be supported. One can become a 'Friend of Thespo' and make contributions to the festival, monetary or otherwise. This year the festival also raised money through the crowd-funding platform Wishberry. Team Thespo strives each year to deliver in spite of the odds, and surely enough, it has made substantial inroads into youth theatre in India.
*Deepa Punjani is the Editor of this website.
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