Stereotypical. Banal. Predictable. AASTHA, written and directed by Saif Hyder Hasan is all this and more. Clumsy about basic theatre fundamentals such as entries, exits, space and time, plays of this ilk are guranteed to add to the woes of contemporary Indian theatre. Unlike the imagined and exuberant critique, theatrically dismissed off by Mr. Hasan’s protagonist-narrator- the playwright Devdutt Bose (Anupam Bhattacharya) at the beginning of the play, here’s some of the real dope in case you are interested.
Performed in English and Hindi, AASTHA suffers from an overdone, filmi kind of a plot in which you are fed the undying moral of the big, bad world of glamour and seduction. It almost appears as if the characteristic and overrated philmi duniya has been superimposed on the theatre. Only it is more sanitized, given the medium it has chosen to express itself in. With regards to the state of our theatre today, there couldn’t be a greater irony than this. Any glimmer of an intellectual side to the play, embodied in the playwright’s persona is soon overtaken by melodrama and over-simplification.
The play’s emphasis is on the relationship that Devdutt Bose comes to have with the famous and successful actor Albert Rocha (Bakul Thakkar), the megalomaniac director-producer Pramod Mittal (Nitesh Pandey) and pertinently so with Aastha (Shweta Gulati), the young and talented actress who is exploited. But there is virtually no exploration of the relationship between the four main characters in the play beyond the exigencies of the plot. Neither the misplaced mime act nor the chanting of religious mantras at the end of the play redeems the play in any way even as it frees Devdutt Bose of his burdened mind.
There is one thing that the play succeeds in doing however. It offers ample opportunity to the actors (to Nitesh Pandey especially) to display their histrionics. At a point you forget whether you are watching Saif Hyder Hasan’s play or the play of the actors themselves. So applause is merited but it better be restricted to the kind of improvised performances you’d see in drama schools. I am sorry Mr. Hasan but even amateur plays have done better.
*The writer is Editor of this site, a theatre critic and an academic keenly interested in Theatre & Performance Studies.
