Many moods on stage
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The Thespo 7 fest had an interesting variety
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Thespo, a competitive youth theatre festival started in 1999 by Q theatre productions in Bombay has for the last five years been an annual event in Bangalore as well. Thespo 7 conducted at Rangashankara featured six plays, three from Bangalore and three from Mumbai. Of the six, five will be staged at the Bombay Thespo. (The Kannada play has been excluded for reasons best known to the organisers.)
The festival opened with the Kannada play Halagali Bedara Dange directed by Poornachandra Tejaswi. Conceived in the style of a folk musical, the play revolves round the mutiny of a hunting community against an order by the British Government to surrender their weapons. The hunters for whom weapons are like an extension of the hand put up a heroic resistance against the powerful British army, but are conquered through cunning.
Great chorus
An excellent onstage chorus, beautifully coordinated movements and colourful props (which won them a prize) were the main assets of the play. Each character expressed its own rhythm and stylised movement. While there was some stereotyping, the characters made an impact. Tejaswi, who played the Gowda, brought out the cowardice and the crookedness of the character well. Kartik Shekar did an excellent job as his underling, Chotya. Paramesh as the priest was highly agile, but fell short in dialogue delivery. The extended grief at the end was overdone.
A somewhat offbeat, witty script Butter and Mashed Banana, an English play written and directed by Ajay Krishnan, won the best original script award. The satirical comedy that had just three male artistes in the cast employed an innovative narrative style and used minimal props. While two of the narrators, holding two ends of a screen and moving to Bharatanatya steps, represented a couple with conflicting ideologies, the third depicted the tragi-comic plight of the offspring of such a marriage. The main motto of the play being "freedom of speech is the freedom to offend", the play was full of irreverent comments on current issues ranging from political alliances to film censorship.
Music was both the strength and weakness of the play because every time there was a song, the play came to a halt.
Mahesh Dattani's Twinkle Tara directed by Gitanjali Kalro, though presented with great sincerity, was a little too raw and amateurish to be in the competition. David Gieselman's Mr. Kolpert, a black comedy directed by Anshuman Jha for his Mumbai-based group was an Alfred Hitchcock thriller and theatre of the absurd rolled into one.
The play revolves around a non-conformist, bored, urban couple who find excitement in killing their guests. Intended to be a satire on the insatiable thirst for violence which fuels a lot of modern films, plays and pulp fiction, in a peculiar way the play quenches it as well. Though the production had its entertaining moments, the sets were rather shabby and the dark humour a little too heavy for the young cast. Though the director has exhibited courage in attempting such a play, the compromises he has been forced to make in the crucial final scene weakens its.
Mohan Rakesh's classic Ashad Ka Ek Din, another Mumbai production directed by Chandan Roy Sanyal, was rather pretentious with cluttered stage and unnecessary auditorium entries. (This was the director's way of involving the audience in the play) The thatched hut and the printed nylon saris used for the backdrop looked really awful as did most of the costumes. The rich, peacock blue pots lying around the hut seemed totally out of place.
Most awards
The play that walked away with most of the awards was My Lord, an emotionally charged Marathi play depicting the increasing loneliness of a young man dying in a hospital. His prolonged illness and the smell of his sores put off the family and the only one who remains with him is the nurse who looks after him. She pleads with the judge not to hand over the body to the family.
Director Shivadarshan Sable (who had also adapted the short story) handled the subject with sensitivity and avoided melodrama. The same control was visible in the design, acting and music. Pratap Phad and Rajasshree Joshi gave a mature and moving performance.
LAXMI CHANDRASHEKAR
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