Setting free
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Rangayana’s performance of Mahesh Elkunchwar’s acclaimed Marathi play, Chirebandi Waade, was outstanding
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Photos: K. Murali Kumar
MEMORABLE Chirebandi Waade made a lasting impact and Sakku Bai was interesting
In a sense, Mahesh Elkunchwar’s celebrated play “Chirebandi Waade” reminds one of Ramsha Lokapur’s “Taayi Saaheba”. Both the play and the novel record the decline and disintegration of the huge Waades, as well as t
he smothering of Brahmin families that lived in villages in post-Independent India. It also juxtaposes the emotional turmoil of people.
“Chirebandi Waade” – a controlled, played-down narrative, except for occasional outbursts – stuns you into a pensive silence. It pushes you into a world of seeming binary opposites pitted against each other — village-town, comfort-distress, getaway-ghetto, vibrant-weary and love-hate. What you encounter along this straight jacketed route, the playwright leads you on, is the complexities that lie within the striking shades of black and white.
Rangayana’s performance of the play at Ravindra Kalakshetra as part of the Karanth Festival last week, directed by Pramila Bengre, was outstanding. The first 20 minutes seemed dark, dismal and too slow; but as the play moved on it gained such power and momentum that the packed audience had no choice but to give themselves up entirely to the happenings on the stage. The play got its force not because it gathered pace, but because of the terrific performances by each of its actors and an exceptional telling by Pramila Bengre. The performance quite remarkably captured the inner, irreconcilable tensions of not just the characters but of the playwright too.
The play is about the venerated family of Dharana Gaonkar Deshpande, living in a village in the Vidharbha region. It begins with the death of the patriarch Tatya, and the manner in which relationships unfold in the next few days (the period of death rites) makes for the plot.
Trapped in tradition and the hangover of a glorious past, there are hardly any routes to liberation for these people. The exacting demands of the community don’t make it any simpler for them. The multi-layered play has the invisible presence of the tractor throughout. This image of the ruthless wheels of technology weaves in the complicated intervention of modernity. The bedridden Ajji who keeps asking what time it is every half hour, becomes Time herself. She is the passive observer who is spectator to things taking their course. The desires, greed, pettiness of the family members, their aspirations and dreams – the play brings it out subtly and beautifully. Redemption and realisation for each one of them comes from within the suffering and not in some idyllic pastoral plains, under the dreamy Bodhi Vruksha. The women of the play (splendid performance by Saroja Hegde) make great philosophical leaps and reinstate their inner sanctity of justice and kindness. Among them, the mother (Pramila Bengre) and daughter Prabha (Shashikala) strike you most. Having lived and seen it all, the pious mother doesn’t see Prabha’s dreams of getting out of the Waade and pursuing her education as threatening to tradition. In fact, she expresses great faith in her aspiration of self-realisation. Tradition and modernity are then not two different entities, but a complex overlap of notions that are ostensibly contradictory.
If one had a problem it was with the inconsistent use of music in the play. The unusually long play (two and a half hours) kept you absorbed.
*** “Sakku Bai” by Shashikala B.N. was a solo performance. Translated from the Marathi original by Chandrakath Kusunur and directed by Manjunath Belakere, the play is one day in the life of a maid. All alone once the couple in the house are out at work and the child at school, Sakku Bai slips into recollection.
The narrative brings up several issues – migration, caste, girl child, hypocrisies of urban life, AIDS – but fails to make an impact. Even in terms of its representation of people, it is rather simplistic. What it finally emerges as is the success story of two generations of women, Sakku Bai as well as her mother, who move on despite odds.
Shashikala’s performance was energetic and lively, but suffered from lack of nuances. It remained high-pitched throughout and moved towards monotony.
What needs a major overhaul is the translation of the poem from Sakku Bai’s daughter’s poetry collection. One, it is far from any lyricism and two, too syrupy.
DEEPA GANESH
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