Welcome return A variety of plays are to be staged in the coming weeks, some taking new forms

Welcome return

A variety of plays are to be staged in the coming weeks, some taking new forms

    The good news is that Om Puri has promised to return to theatre and has also revived the theatre group Majma. When Prithvi Theatre was started in 1978, many new groups had been established — a bunch of National School of Drama graduates, with Om Puri as the moving force, had formed Majma and did great work before they disbanded and went into films and TV. Om Puri, along with his NSD and FTII buddy Naseeruddin Shah, went on to become poster boys of the parallel cinema movement. While Shah maintained his theatre roots, Puri’s stage work fizzled out by the mid 1980s. Now, as the film roles that come his way don’t even scratch the surface of his talent, he wants to produce and act in plays. To begin with, there’s Teri Amrita, which he has also directed — an excellent Punjabi translation by Amrik Gill of Javed Siddiqui’s Tumhari Amrita. Co-starring with him is Diva Dutta, whose earlier foray into theatre, with a forgettable play, came to nought. The Punjabi is not hard to understand for anyone who has seen enough YRF films and TV, and watching Om Puri while hearing his wonderful voice on stage is quite a treat. He promises, that a month later, he will have his next production ready. He is also working on a new play with a Delhi-based writer and director, which is a political satire.
    The accompanying picture has Om Puri and Naseeruddin Shah enjoying an afternoon of theatre — both of them are doing plays at NCPA’s Centrestage Festival, it would undoubtedly be a coup if these two titans could be cast in a play together.
Gasha, a new play written by Irawati Karnik and conceived and directed by Abhishek Majumdar, comes to Mumbai from Bangalore, along with another play — The Afterlife of Birds — by the group Indian Ensemble. Abhishek’s play Djinns of Eidgah, about a traumatised Kashmir, that was staged at the Writers’ Bloc Festival earlier this year, and won huge acclaim, had written another play about Kashmir, called Rizwaan. He felt that yet another play was brimming up, this one telling the story from a Kashmiri Pandit’s point of view. He collaborated with playwright Irawati Karnik, who says that they had begun to find “interesting similarities and differences in our personalities and our approach to theatre”.
    The process of creating this play, with valuable inputs from actor Adhir Bhatt, who is a Kashmiri Pandit himself, started a year ago with a workshop. Later Irawati, Abhishek and Subhashim Goswami (a sociologist, who was the dramaturg on the project), travelled to Srinagar where they interacted with a lot of people. As the first draft emerged, Sandeep Shikhar, one of the core members of Indian Ensemble, became a part of the play about a Kashmiri Pandit and a Muslim boy. During the rehearsal, more ideas came up and were incorporated into the script. Very few plays are done with this close and collaborative method — in Mumbai time and distances make it almost impossible — and the end result is almost always fulfilling for both performer and audience. Gasha opens in Bangalore before travelling to Mumbai, along with The Afterlife of Birds, which is based on true stories set against the backdrop of the LTTE.
Jaya d ev Hattangady was an integral part of Awishkar theatre group, and they marked his fourth death anniversary on December 5, with a new version of a play that he had directed in the past — Shankar Shesh’s Poster, now directed by Ajit Bhagat. The many people he associated with during his work in theatre still miss him.
    — Deepa Gahlot

Om Puri and Naseeruddin Shah