Theatre in 2017: A salute to the stage

While the silver screen will always draw in audiences in droves, there are many who prefer the intimacy of a play and the experience of watching actors delivering their lines live in front of them. The year 2017 was a good one for theatre-goers, what with some interesting plays being staged, in terms of content, creativity, themes and innovation. After Hrs takes a look at some of the productions that were most talked-about on the stage...

Salaam Noni Appa 

While Pad Man is yet to release, Twinkle Khanna’s other short story from The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad — Salaam Noni Appa — was adapted for the stage by Adhir Bhat and directed by Lillete Dubey. The story, which revolves around two sisters, Noni and Binny, and was centered around the idea of finding love in the autumn of your life, starred Dubey herself. Says Lillete, “I read Salaam Noni Appa a day after it came out and found it a delightful story with sharp insights about the minutiae of everyday life and relationships. I felt like performing, too, in a piece that resonated with me in terms of life stage/age and was utterly real.” She adds that Twinkle was involved from the start and was excited about the stage version. “She had seen drafts of the script and was happy with the final version where we have tried to stay true to her story with some additional dialogues and a couple of small new scenes,” says Lillete. The play has completed 14 shows already in Bengaluru, Delhi, Pune, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Kolkata, Ahmedabad and Chennai and will be travelling to Pune, Baroda, Gurgaon and to the US for a multi-city tour in April 2018.

The Father

The Father was probably the most ambitious production for Motley, Naseeruddin Shah’s theatre production company, for mainly two reasons. First, the play by French playwright Florian Zeller, had continuous, month-long runs at two venues in the city. And the other, is that it is about mental dysfunction, a topic rarely explored on stage. “I am willing to take the risk not because I am confident of packing the theatre every night but because I am convinced the experiment will reap its rewards in the sense of all participants realising the value of pulling together for an extended time and getting to the shore, so to say, guided by the experience of being continually observed by an audience, which is something, I reiterate, stage actors in India seldom get the opportunity to do,” Naseer had said when the play premiered.

Mother Courage and her Children

Stalwart Arundhati Nag returned to the Mumbai stage after 38 years for this play, which also had Aamir Khan’s son Junaid making his debut in theatre. German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht’s classic Mother Courage and Her Children was adapted for the Aadyam initiative by Quasar Thakore Padamsee. The play, which was a satire about survival, entrepreneurship and the absurdity of war, was written in the 1930s. “It’s very contemporary in terms of what it talks about, partly to our situation, but also to a larger global narrative. Even though the play was written in the 1930s, the ideas are still completely relevant,” Quasar had told us.

The Threepenny Opera

Bertolt Brecht’s raucous musical The Threepenny Opera, was the play Naseeruddin Shah’s son Imaad Shah made his directorial debut with. Starring actor Arunoday Singh, Saba Azad and Vivaan Shah among others, the play was a visual spectacle that included elements of punk rock, film noir, cabaret, and jazz choreography. Imaad had been involved with the material of the play almost two years ago. “I started working with the musicians, analysing the music, breaking down the arrangements and thinking how do I want to work with the music. I have been told that it is after a really long time in the Indian theatre scene, at least in terms of non Hindustani classical musicals, to have completely live music being played on stage,” he says.

Shikhandi: The Story of the In-betweens

A runner-up at the Sultan Padamsee Playwriting Awards 2016, Shikhandi is a comic, tongue-in-cheek retelling of the story of Shikhandi, mixing the traditional with the contemporary. Perhaps one of the earliest trans-characters known in mythology, Shikhandi was meant to be born male to avenge an insult in her past life as Amba. But the bigger karmic game unfolds when she is reborn female, raised male, has a sex change (thanks to a yaksha) on her wedding night when she runs away into the forest, and finally fulfills her destiny — to be the cause of Bhishma’s death. Written and directed by Faezeh Jalali, the critically-acclaimed play questions maleness, femaleness and everything in between.

Black Box plays

This year, Aadyam introduced the black box category and staged two plays — Guards at The Taj by Danish Husain and Ghajab Kahani by Mohit Takalkar. While the format is being explored by a few theatre groups in the city, having a separate category specially dedicated to the same, has given a boost to it. Aadyam artistic director Divya Bhatia says, “The logic of theatre allows us to experience truth together and the black box format can facilitate just that by immersing you (the audience) right in the heart of the story and the action. Compared to the proscenium style of theatre which is often more about what you’re able to watch and hear, a well-designed and executed black box experience allows us to engage directly with our own responses and our reactions, pushing us beyond the limits of our imagination.”