A theatre fest for society

The four-day theatre festival ‘Abhinaya National Theatre Festival-2013’ has plays from across the country that talk of socially relevant issues

Arundhuti Banerjee

Dario Fo, an Italian playwright-actor had said, “A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.” The popular multi-lingual theatre festival of South India, Abhinaya National Theatre Festival-2013 at Ravindra Bharathi had four theatre groups from Benguluru, Jharkhand, Assam and Manipur participating. The plays made based on mythology, humour, folklore etc spoke of social issues.

The Kannada play ‘Kinnudia Belakalli’ directed by Ramakrishna Beltur was based on Kannada folklore.” We have projected the reason of our sorrow and how to get over that through a mythological story,” said the director Ramakrishna Beltur. Their play talked about how the mellow voice of lone crusader advocates against dishonesty that is lost amidst the cauldron of superfluous clamour. The character Kala Bhairava in the play was the apparition campaigner, quite figuratively.

On the second day of the festival a tribal group from Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, talked about some serious issues of our society in a humorous way in their play titled ‘Fevicol’. “There are many issues we are facing in rural areas due to lack of industrial development -land acquisition, migration, cultural conflict, the translocation of green carpet in concrete forest etc., Though I am not against development, I cannot support administrative insensibility,” said Jeetrai Hansda, the director of the play. This theatre group started their journey in 1992 with a vision to provide a platform to tribal theatre. “Though we work with various people from different levels of our society; my initial interest was to encourage tribal people in this folk art form,” shared the director. Talking about Hyderabadi audience he expressed his happiness, “There are so many people who speak in Hindi and understand the language. So I am in a better position to reach out and connect with the audience.”

Sarsa Dakshin Chuburi from Assam staged ‘Dusmanta: The liar’, a play based on Mahakavi Kalidas’s ‘Abhigyana Shakuntalam’ directed by Asim Kumar Nath. In his play, Asim has given a different perspective of the King Dusmanta’s character. “Raja Dusmanta is nothing but a politician of today’s time who went out to forest for amusement and fell in love with Shakuntala. Later when he came back to his normal life, he forgot about her and all the commitment and promises he was supposed to keep,” said the director. According to him, the curse episode of Durvasa muni was nothing but an explanation from Kalidas to make Dusmanta innocent. “Think about it logically, Kalidas was the court poet; he was not supposed to go against king. Can he?” asked Asim. The play revives the traditional Ujapali theatre form of Assam.

One of the most popular theatre groups from Manipur, ‘NT Theatre’ will stage ‘Lament of a Widow’, a play inspired by the character Karna of Mahabharata on Tuesday, August 13. “In Manipur, plays are mostly based on insurgency issue. While it is a serious problem, I wanted to bring something new to the audience. So I have chosen a mythological character to talk about the problems in our society,” said Deepak Ningthouja, the play director. His play talks of the caste discrimination that Karna faces.

It must have been a huge challenge for the theatre group to continue their practice in a place like Imphal where people spend their day under curfew and girls are attacked frequently. “Yes, our life is not normal like other citizens of our country. But I am happy to tell you that after central government’s allotted a building to us; all our members stay with us during the production and rehearsal. We do not allow them to go out for security reasons,” shared Ronika Deepak, the production manager of the group. They hope to break the language barrier and entertain the city audience with their play.