Vignettes of veterans

Natyotsav, festival recently held in Pune, paid tribute to four generations of Marathi playwrights. GOWRI RAMNARAYAN analyses.

``YOU MUST come and see this young group in action, they are as enthusiastic as our Pune Theatre Academy members had been back in the 1970s,'' said Dr. Mohan Agashe, thespian with a long innings in Marathi theatre, and in films from Shyam Benegal's ``Nishant'' to M. F. Husain's ``Gajagamini''. Playwright Satish Alekar endorsed this view.

Natyotsav 2001 (May 20-24), organised by Samanvay, Pune, proved them right. The festival paid tribute to four generations of Marathi playwrights - Vijay Tendulkar, Mahesh Elkunchwar, Satish Alekar and Rajeev Naik - in productions by Samanvay, the Pune Theatre Academy, and Pratyay from Kolhapur.

The morning sessions had play readings, and candid interviews with the playwrights. Rajeev Naik was asked, ``You seem to be more of a dialogue writer, are you a playwright at all?'' This enabled him to say that drama was only a part of the far wider terrain of the theatre. Likewise Elkunchwar was quizzed about his reflexivity, more characteristic of the novel than of a play. It sparked some keen, even tart, self-analysis in the playwright. Laughter livened the proceedings. The real relief, however, was the absence of rhetoric and bombast, which all too often mar(k) literary meets.

An evening too was allotted to Elkunchwar. ``Yugant'', the third in his celebrated trilogy, directed by Shashank Shende, was an achievement for Samanvay. By and large, even experimental theatre in Marathi sticks to the box format. Relying on the text and actor, it is not known for innovations in visual or auditory imagery. But ``Yugant'' managed something more than the commonplace with the wooden platforms on the stage. It tried to heighten the impact of the drought with the image of water, to make you perceive its literal, metaphoric, symbolic and spiritual significations.

From the moment affluent cousin Abhay returns from abroad to visit his ancestral home in a Vidarbha village, winded by the heat, hastily grabbing the water jug from sister-in-law Nandini, we know that ``Yugant'' is about the aridity in human societies and the individual soul. The scorching materialism has dried up all sources of compassion, love and spirituality. We see the contrast between the city-bred Abhay riddled by defeatist loneliness despite a zooming career graph, and the contentment of Parag and Nandini determined not to knuckle under the mounting destitution in the famine-ravaged landscape.

This is not an easy play for performance. But the young cast was able to do justice to the playwright's layering of new subtleties in the age-old antithesis of village and town. If Sunil Abhyankar brought authenticity to Abhay, Shashank Shende was compelling as Parag, evoking both the strength and fragility in the human soul. As the play proceeded, so did the bonding of the cast, the emotions heightening in interaction. Even a power cut could not disrupt the performance, which continued undimmed under impromptu lighting.

``Vaasansi Jeernani'' which followed, had Elkunchwar scrutinising the phenomenon of death, as it affects the dying and the living. There are many strands here for cogitation, but the varied, well- fleshed out characters ensure liveliness even in the death chamber.

Fascinating structure

The play has a fascinating structure. It has a single Act and scene, running through a gamut of feelings. Instead of dialogue you have essentially a criss-cross of monologues. The impending death of Baba, the scholarly head of the family, triggers a flood of suppressed fears, disillusionments, anger and yearning, by every family member, from daughter Sanju who is furious that her father did not stop her marriage to an uneducated hard-drinking mechanic, and son Mukund who has no patience to wait through the darksome vigil. Eldest son Bal is torn by the grief of not being able to understand why he was distanced from the father he adored. How can he know that Baba suspected him to have been fathered by another? Wife Manorama makes a frantic last-minute attempt to understand why she had no place in her husband's heart. While old Kaku who found shelter in their home as a young widow and served them all faithfully, discloses her love for Baba, kept sternly hidden through the long years.

Amidst the deluge of unspoken thoughts, feelings, confessions and explications, Baba stands alone, his tired soul calling out incessantly for death. He meanders in the home, while his family thinks he is comatose and bedridden. He responds to their outpourings, but no one can hear him. They can see him only at the moment of his escape from the mortal world.

More imaginative lighting and set design could have been invaluable to a play of this kind, as also more stage space than was available at the Bharatnatya Mandir which cramped the flow of movement. But director Sandesh Kulkarni evoked good performa-nces from the young actors to complement thespians Mohan Agashe, Suhas Joshi and Jyoti Subhash. Playwright Chandrasekhar Phansalkar was well cast as Bal.

The adaptations did not satisfy. ``Mitradvay'' (Dir: Kiran Yagnopavit, Samanvay) from Cervantes' ``Don Quixote'', has a man asking his best friend to test the loyalty of his wife. The friend falls in love with the woman who responds with ardour. Chauvinistic in theme, facile in the solution of `forget-and-be- friends-again', the play seemed to shift abruptly from well brought off comedy to sagging realism. Perhaps this was a problem only if you didn't follow the Marathi dialogue closely. But why didn't the sensuality come through in body language?

Taking up Marathi poet Vinda Karandikar's lyrical translation of Shakespeare for a three-hour show of ``Raja Lear'', with a cast/crew of nearly 40 persons, was no mean challenge. But director Dr. Sharad Bhutadia's conventional treatment had no excitements to offer beyond fidelity to the text. You could feel the rhythms in the swing of the metre, in the rhyming couplets as scenes closed, in the Fool's songs, and in the soliloquies. The supporting cast was at best merely competent. Some betrayed the influence of TV serials.

The first act had a tautness that the rest of the play could not match. But Dr. Bhutadia himself made a wonderful Lear, his voice, gesture and movements tracing the startling changes of heart and mind that the old king undergoes as he is exposed to a bewildering array of experiences hitherto unknown. He too was more convincing as the wayward monarch than as mad man or penitent father.

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