Many plays continue to have a hold over every new generation of audiences and directors, who keep going back to them
Not too many plays stand the test of time, but there are some that continue to have a hold over every new generation of audiences. One is not referring to the great classics — Shakespeare, for instance, will never fade away — but plays by well-known Indian or international writers, that directors keep going back to.
One such play is Madhu Rye’s Koi Pan Ek Phool Nu Naam Bolo To, which had had several productions in the past, and has been resurrected in an award-winning Marathi version called Ha Shekhar Khosla Kon Aahe? directed by Vijay Kenkre from an adaptation by Vijay Shirke.
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A scene from Ha Shekhar Khosla Kon Aahe? directed by Vijay Kenkre
It is a play set within the world of theatre-the opening scene is from a play being staged, called Aani Mhanje Kaahi Hi, a messy web of relationship triangles, in which a gun gets tossed around with everybody wanting to commit suicide or kill someone. They all decide that a blackmailing ex-boyfriend of one of the women should be the one to die, but when the actress holding the gun shoots, it is to kill a man sitting in the auditorium. A man called Shekhar Khosla. Someone has switched the fake bullets in the pistol for real ones, and the man dies.
The characters step out of the play-within-a-play, interestingly the actors go by their real first names-the killer, Madhura (Velankar Satam) is arrested and the witnesses cross examined in court-and all of them swear they don’t know who Shekhar Khosla was.
Their relationships off the stage are as complex as the ones created by the writer Sushil (Inamdar), who was also doing a bit part in the play and has a big crush on Madhura. There is Madhura’s fiancé Lokesh (Gupte), her nasty drunkard brother Tushar (Dalvi), and another actor couple, Vivek (Gore) and Sharvri (Lohokare), whose marriage is not as happy as it seems from the outside.
As the play progresses, the actors keep stepping to another side of the stage to enact ‘flashbacks’ of seemingly small incidents, conversations, quarrels, that led to the murder. Outside of the court, all of them admit to knowing about Shekhar Khosla, and having good enough motive to tamper with the gun.
At the centre of all the chaos is Madhura, who, it soon becomes clear, is in a fragile mental state, even though she appears to accept her exploitation by her brother and by the man she will marry-they are using her fame as a ladder, and the infatuated writer is an observer of all the dramas being played out.
It is obviously why the play has not lost its grip-it is a complex, unpredictable and suspenseful psychological thriller; first premiered in 1969, it does not seem at all dated nearly half a century later. In fact, with its marital merry-go-rounds, it must have been ahead of its time back then.
Not that being dated prevents a really good play from losing its sheen-a current example being 12 Angry Jurors, directed by Nadir Khan, reworking Reginald Rose’s all-time classic 12 Angry Men.
In India, the jury system was abolished in the 1960s, so the story about twelve people of disparate temperaments, age brackets and social strata thrown together in a room to decide on the fate of a young man accused of murdering his father, is not exactly realistic. All evidence and witness testimonies are against him, the accused comes from a poor family and is a troublemaker; the jury wants to hand over the guilty verdict and get out of the stuffy space, but one man (Rajit Kapur) introduces an element of doubt. It is, as he argues, a matter of a human life, they owe it to the young man to give the matter due consideration.
The jury room is a microcosm of class (and if one looks closely, caste) prejudices, personal issues, bad memories and a whole lot of things that indicate that nobody can be totally objective, they would be influenced by their upbringing and past-some see the boy from an underprivileged background as worthy of sacrificing for the general good, another can rustle up the compassion to allow him an opportunity to redeem himself. The way the opinions of the twelve jurors swing one way and the other, the audience see-saws its sympathy too, even though the accused remains off stage.
It is the kind of play that can never go wrong, or to put it another way, cannot be messed up even with an amateur group of bad actors, which Nadir Khan’s version is not-it had some of the best actors from the Mumbai stage, who managed to expertly paper over any cracks that appeared.
One of the earlier productions of the play was in Hindi, by a short-lived theatre company called Majma, that was formed by graduates of the National School of Drama. It had actors like Pankaj Kapur, MK Raina, KK Raina and Annu Kapoor. Ek Ruka Hua Faisla was turned into a film by Basu Chatterjee, and after all these years, it is still worth seeing, as is the Hollywood masterpiece 12 Angry Men by Sidney Lumet. One man’s conviction makes for an evergreen classic.
Deepa Gahlot is an award-winning film and theatre critic and an arts administrator. She tweets at @deepagahlot
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