Take a Bow: Top five stage productions from 2014

Directed by Ratna Pathak Shah and enacted by Naseeruddin Shah, the play based on Gabriel Emanuel’s Einstein opened the annual Prithvi Theatre Festival. It captures the spirit of the lovable figure, who, despite being a great scientist, was plagued with doubts, disappointments and failures, in common with the rest of mankind.

Ila

Based on Devdutt Pattnaik’s book The Pregnant King, Ila, a devised play directed by Puja Sarup and Sheena Khalid, questions what it means to be a woman and who defines manhood. With ever-changing landscapes and leaps in time, the androgynous chorus takes the audience through a provocative, playful and exciting journey that explores “what it is to be a woman/man and everything in between”.

She-He-Shey

This play premiered at the Tagore festival in Kolkata in 2013 and has had several shows in Mumbai this year. It’s a stage adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s book Shey (Se), a collection of stories of extraordinary adventures, created for his nine-year-old granddaughter Nandini. Directed by Shaili Sathyu, this also brings alive Tagore’s poems and paintings.

Aayadan

More than a decade after Urmila Pawar’s autobiography was published, a Marathi stage adaptation of it, titled Aayadan, directed by Sushma Deshpande, opened the National Centre for Performing Arts’ theatre festival, Pratibimb, earlier this year. The two-hour play follows the journey of Pawar, who had to encounter both caste and gender biases before she was regarded a strong literary voice.

Aaj Jaane Ki Zidd Na Karo

Adapted and directed by Saumya Joshi, this bold Gujarati play is an unconventional love story of a cop and a call girl who, incidentally, meet in a compartment of a Mumbai local train. A series of events follows and turns their normal life into an eventful journey.