For a good laugh
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The culmination of Sutradhar’s acting workshop with this play proved its success. C. Suresh Kumar
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Suthradhar in connection with their 16th acting workshop recently staged a one act Hindi play titled Neem Hakin- Khatra e Jaan, based on Moliere’s Physician Inspite Of Himself.
The play,staged at the Saptaparani amphitheatre, Banjara Hills,was packed to capacity.
The play adapted in Hindi by Niyati Surelia, revolved around a watchman who is a drunkard and harasses his wife, every day. To teach him a lesson, the wife plans to fix him for his deeds by proclaiming him to be a physician who could cure any ailment. At the same moment, a rich landlord is looking for a good doctor who can cure his daughter who has become a lunatic all of a sudden.
The watch man is beaten up by the henchmen of the landlord till he accepts that he is a doctor much to the delight of his wife. Finally he is taken to the landlord’s house and he begins his treatment in his own way. During the course of the treatment he realises that the daughter is actually faking her lunacy as she is in love with someone and wants to avoid marrying a boy of her father’s choice Finally the watchman turned doctor plotsa way to help the lovers run away and get married. The play was full of action packed scenes and hilarious. The adaptation was little confusing as the story relatesto the 17th century and some part of the dialogues seemed more modern and at times vulgarMoliere’s same play was staged in English version few years back and was very clean in presentation, hence when such old plays are being adapted; more care should be taken, to not lose track of the theme of the original version. The characters were seen mouthing latest filmy dialogues for few minutes and immediately following the nawabi style of dialogues.
The artistes were running around the stage too many times for no reason and the main character who is a drunkard delivered one sentence in a slurred way and became sober in the next sentence, which showed poor continuity of scene depiction.
The main character Nathulal played by Sandeep had lot of scope to display his talent and he did reasonably well though he overacted most of the times and at few instances fumbled on the dialogues. The wife of the watchman played by Vaishali gave a good performance, though one wondered why she climbed up a chair during the last scene. Barring these deficiencies, the play was enjoyable and was a laugh riot.The artistes who took part in the play were Sandeep Hemnani as Nathulal, Vaishali Ray as Shanta bhai, Narayan Subramaniam Iyer as the Diwan, Niyati Surelia as Chanda Bai, Lakshmi Vishwanathan as the daughter, Rakesh raj as the lover boy, George Rakesh and Mohit played the roles of the Diwan’s assistants and the neighbor role was played by Kedar.
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