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Three plays at Jairangam Jaipur Fringes Theatre’s Mumbai Fest

Meaning liberation, Mukkti (the extra k is discretionary) Cultural Hub has three auditoria, and two of them are contextually titled Nirvana and Azadi (freedom). The third is simply known as Mukkti Cultural Hub auditorium. This one and Nirvana were the venues for the Jairangam Jaipur Fringes Theatre Festival, Mumbai, held during December 15-17. Nirvana does not have fixed seats, while the Auditorium is like any regular drama or music hall. On each of the three days, the 4 pm show was at Nirvana while the 7 pm premium show was in the auditorium. I managed to watch three of the six plays, two in the auditorium and one in Nirvana.

Pitaji Please, written and directed by Makarand Deshpande, a theatre veteran who has distinguished himself over the last thirty years by staging 50 one-act plays and 40 full-length ones, was a good start, as festivals go. A Hindu father, who has latent aversion to Muslims, is faced with a dilemma. A liberal on the surface—he eats meat and drinks alcohol--, he does not know how to react when he discovers signs of Islam among his son’s belongings and a packet of dates from Saudi Arabia. Is his son getting close to a Muslim? What if it is a girl? What if he is in love with her? His imagination runs riot, although their housemaid and his dead wife try to knock some sense into him. (He talks to a picture of his dead wife and even leads her out of the frame into the living room). The son, as a matter of fact, is in love with a girl who happens to be a Muslim. Not knowing how to break this to his father, he brings her home and introduces her as Swati, the name of his dead mother. The real and imaginary blend after that, with the man having several conversations with his wife and the cast acting out scenarios emanating from the possibility of the son converting to Islam, and, what’s more, he imagines that he too has converted to Islam, for the love of his son.

Though the son says “Pitaji Please!” once or twice in the play, the title is unsuitable. It suggests a catch phrase or an indication that the son is fed up of his father, neither being the case. A regular play, with an elaborate set, it uses a flight of stairs and a deck to suggest that the family lives in a bungalow and stars are visible from their terrace. Since there is a barrier between father and son, the writer has used the character of the dead wife and the housemaid to push the proceedings on. In the process, the wife gets some applause, while the maid gets lots of applause and many laughs. Projected as a motor-mouth, worldly-wise individual, she is given a funny gait, about which the father comments but the cause of which is never explained. After a while, the filmy flash-forward technique begins to jar and intrudes on the subject matter. The fact that everybody in the hose speaks Hindi, in spite of they all being Maharashtrians is well explained and the occasional Marathi touches add flavour. Performances were uniformly good, with veteran actor-lyricist Swanand Kirkire as the father and Zahan Kapoor as the son. Aakanksha Gade played the portly maid. It is not clear from the handout who played the wife; it could be either or: Snehal Malgundkar/Namrata Phadke. The girl acting as the beloved was Madhuri Gawli.

At 135 minutes, Pitaji Please was a little too long.

Rating: ***

Kiss of the Spider Woman is also somewhat of a misnomer, having nothing to do with spiders or spider-woman. It does have something to do with a kiss, though, which comes towards the end of the play. It showed 90 minutes on my programme sheet, but I got the distinct feeling that it was105 minutes long, what with so many fade-outs, albeit on the same composite set. Another factor that made the play feel longer was the fact that the director asked the management to switch off the air-conditioning completely. A completely enclosed theatre, with no ventilation whatsoever, is a nightmare in the afternoon, but the unit was concerned that the noisy air-conditioners would be an impediment in listening to the dialogue, which was largely delivered in low pitch, without the use of microphones. It was a toss between audiences’ comfort and the performers’ needs, and the troupe chose the latter. What if the audience walked out? They risked that. I stayed back, since I had a duty to perform, and came out feeling queasy. The set consisted of two parts, one used as the cell, along with an exterior, and another corner, right of stage, depicting the police and Kiran’s meeting room. Kiran?

Kiran, a stereotypical homosexual cross dresser woman, accused of sexual perversion, and Divy (not Divya, please—the character insists, and rightly so, that if it is pronounced as Divya, it becomes a woman’s name), a political prisoner accused of revolutionary activities, are made to share the same cell in jail. Their escapades in prison, their exchanges, altercations and how they bide their time, to cope with the hardships and monotony form the crux of the plot. In order to pass the time, Kiran narrates the story, in great detail but in instalments, of a movie he once saw. These two unlikely allies end up as friends, after all! Or do they, really? Does Kiran have an ulterior motive in befriending Divy? Has he struck a deal with the prison authorities? Three penmen have been credited with the playwriting: Playwright Manuel Puig, Dramaturge Vikram Phukan and Hindi Adaptation by Prateek Srivastava.

Manuel Puig (1932-90), Argentinian novelist and motion-picture scriptwriter, achieved international acclaim with his novel El beso de la mujer araña (1976; Kiss of the Spider Woman, filmed 1985, brought an Oscar to William Hurt, who played Molina, renamed Kiran here). Puig learned English as a child by seeing every American film he could. He went to Rome in 1957 to study film directing and resided for a time in Stockholm and London. When he returned to Buenos Aires, his film scripts were not well received, and he decided that the cinema was not to be his only career.

Kiss of the Spider Woman is a novel told in dialogues between a middle-aged homosexual and a younger revolutionary, who are detained in the same jail cell. The book’s denunciation of sexual and political repression, treated poetically and with an uncommon degree of tenderness, contributed to its success. Vikram Phukan is a Mumbai-based playwright and stage critic. His work includes Stories in a Song, Limbo, an Indian adaptation of Arthur Miller’s The Price and Tape-The King of Drag. He runs the theatre appreciation website, Stage Impressions and has formerly edited India’s first registered LGBT publication, Bombay Dost magazine (2009-10).

Director Hardik Shah is an actor, director and founder of Five Sense Theatre Group. He graduated from the National School of Drama (NSD) and is a diploma-holder from Shree Ram Centre for Performing Arts (SRC). Hardik’s works include films as an actor: Whiskey is Risky in Gujarati, Venalodungathey in Malayalam, TVC’s, short films and TV serials. Hardik has designed and directed: Kiss of the Spider Woman, Parineeta, The Pillowman, The Airport, Rustom-o-Sohrab, Phool & Fools, The Monkey’s Paw, Dear Departed and many more.

In terms of production values, lights and set, the play was above par. However, it does get a bit problematic when you bring in a commode as part of the set and one of your two main characters, Divy, suffers from diarrhea. It is stated that he has passed a motion while in bed and he asks his Kiran whether he has stained his knickers, while Kiran wipes him. In another scene, Kiran gets into position with his derrière, inviting Divy to a homosexual encounter. Swearing, too, is served in generous measure, not to mention the Kiss of the Spider Woman. Now is all this germane to the story and required to tell the tale? Let us say there could have been several other ways of saying the things that are said, suggested or implied. It takes some guts to go through such acts and deliver such dialogue with a straight face. We respect the choices of the writers and the director, but we also reserve the right to get repulsed by the goings on. Frequent outbursts of Divy and the ensuing apologies get repetitive. Hardik Shah himself played Kiran. Other members of the cast include Mukti Ravi Das and Gurinder Kumar.

Rating: ** ½

Baanswada Company, in Hindi and Rajasthani, 140 minutes long with an intermission, bordered on slapstick and buffoonery to raise laughs, which it did in plenty. Set in Baanswada, Rajasthan, it is the tale of a theatrical company owner and director, named Bhalchand, who dreams Baanswada to be India's top theatre company, and also wants to bring his father, Khayali Ram's dream of showcasing a Shakespearean play, to reality soon. With a troupe that comprises eccentrics and a blind musician, the company barely manages to make ends meet. A producer, Kirodimal, suggests that they should get female artistes to play female roles, which will surely attract large audiences. But in conservative Baanswada, that is hardly possible. Out of the blue, one of the actors brings in an oversized Japanese tourist, who speaks a smattering of Hindi, to join the troupe, and they continue with their production of excerpts from the Ramayan, with one female artiste. Bent on staging a Shakespeare play, Bhalchand is given the script of Othello by the blind musician, in whose body Khayali Ram makes frequent ‘possessions’ and speaks through him as if he was a medium.

Writer-director Niresh Kumar has a Master’s degree in theatre from the Department of Indian Theatre, Punjab University, and is also an alumnus of the National School of Drama. His play toes a familiar line, wherein a clutch of actors, who double up as prop-makers and mask-makers, show varying degrees of ludicrous, immature, puerile behavior, leading to laughs. It is incomprehensible why a Muslim man, who was brought up in the company of Hindus after he was picked up as a homeless urchin, insists on wearing a distinctive Muslim cap when enacting a part from the Ramayan, albeit as a faux pas. As if that were not enough, he speaks chaste Urdu in a scene where the dialogue should have been in chaste, Sanskritised Hindi. Where did he pick-up these habits? Surely not in Baanswada Company! Hold on. Asked to construct the set of a hut in the jungle, he presents a miniature as the real thing, and does not bat an eyelid when questioned. In the cast were Nikhil Modi, Sachin Bhatt (as a tabla player and music composer of the play), Amrit Arora as the drunkard star, Jaswinder Singh, Jyoti Negi as the ‘Japanese tourist’, Madhumita Barik, Ankur Agarwal, Varun Panwar, Elakshi Morey Gupta, Jaswinder Singh, Anuj Khurana, Mohan Sagar, Akash Bhanushali and Prakash Parida. Not surprisingly, the drunkard swayed applause in his favour. What is it about drunks that endears them to theatre and film audiences?

Rating: **

Overall, Jairangam was a mixed bag.