Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | NXg | Friday Review | Cinema Plus | Young World | Property Plus | Quest |

Love and life

Photo: R. Ravindran

TWINED The play retains an uncorrupted old-world charm in all its limpidness

Does theatre here and now necessarily mean doing a play written right amidst us? Does harking back to the past indicate being stuck fast into a time warp? Hardly. If serious theatre practitioners distress that we flog and roil the age-old Kannada pla ywrights over and over again, it’s no derision. Lament. “Sangathi Arinhya!” and “Moonshine and Skytoffee” based on the ingenious Malayalam writer Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s short stories, staged at Rangashankara, heightened such feelings. Both the plays by the Chennai-based Perch, directed by Rajiv Krishnan, spectacularly recast the great writer’s works, foregrounding his vision of life — humanistic and profound.

A story, within a story, some fact, some fiction, — “Sangathi Arinhya!” is a kaleidoscope. In a stream-of-consciousness mode, it goes back and forth, weaving the seven chosen stories into the writer’s overall philosophical disposition. A complex canvas comprising lively, colourful characters, the play remains not just a splendid weave of a variety of people and their ways of life but also a brilliant juxtaposition of the comic and the tragic. This second register — of irony, satire and sorrow — the play achieves with equanimity that is true of the writer’s works itself. To cast Basheer just as a comic writer would be disservice: the production brings his lightness of touch, sharply. The gentle, melancholic Talat Mahmood song, “Sham-e- gam ki kasam” comes as a lovely refrain: of course serves as a reminder of the element of serious. “Moonshine and Skytoffee” is more straightforward involving only two stories, both based on the theme of love: they are laid out beautifully.

Perch’s deep engagement with the writer was visible throughout. The simple, yet striking stage design: Basheer under the shaded Mangosteen tree, his favourite gramophones, the Mappilah community he wrote about, and his umbrella — it was all authentic and marked by an unmistakable simplicity of being.

The gregarious opening scene of “Sangathi Arinhya!” brings together at once, the entire world of Basheer — which is a coalesce of his private and public realm. The play set in the deceased Bhargavi Kutty’s (Bhargavi Nilayam”) house is poignant; fusing reality and imagination remarkably. Bhargavi Kutty was the ideal love that Basheer aspired: something that surmounted the corporeal. Basheer reading out stories to Bhargavi (even as it was played out), playing songs, and resting implicit faith in her love is very moving. Locating the play here also renders it with timelessness — of love, of the writer’s works.

What goes to the credit of this production is the manner in which it arrests the modern outlook of Basheer without any pretences of the modern age. In that, the play retains an uncorrupted old-world charm in all its limpidness not losing sight of the progressive views of the writer. It almost seemed that the brilliant set of actors, naturals that each of them were, had invoked upon themselves the spirit of Basheer, exactly in the way he conceived his characters. Jagan as Mandan Muthappa in “Moonshine and…” was brilliant: his body language as a street smart, the earthy, raw twang to his use of language was terrific. Aparna Gopinath’s transformations into multiple roles had fabulous spontaneity and ease. She was a show stealer.

The touching closing lines of the play lingered on, rooting it in the contemporary. Writing, for Basheer, was so mean pastime. It was a deep commitment. Read what he has to say: “For you I am an open book. You can read and sense leisurely at your own convenience. But you are still a great enigma to me. …The time for that journey is drawing near. And you alone will remain of the reality, You and I.

You, alone.”

Footnote:

Saigal sings the soulful lullaby “Soja Rajakumari”; audience finds it funny. The soldier bemoans the murder of his friend, surrounded by a gnawing silence; huge applause. Basheer declares his intense bond with writing: “If I don’t write I will explode!”; an uproar.

What ails us an audience that leaves us completely out of the theatrical process? Why do we merely ‘see’ and not ‘behold’?

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail