The Play That Never Was

The theatre performance ended with the glum ‘director’ announcing in chaste Hindi,“The play never happened”. Incomplete,however,was the word farthest from the audience’s minds. Bhanu Bharti’s Tamasha Na Hua,staged in Delhi on Tuesday,proved to be intellectually stimulating and thought provoking.

The play,a tribute to Rabindranath Tagore on his 150th anniversary,began with a theatre group rehearsing Tagore’s Muktdhara (The Waterfall). The story of a tyrannical king,who decides to dam a waterfall in order to deprive those who depend on it for water,is said to symbolise Tagore’s admiration for Mahatma Gandhi. In Bharti’s interpretation,however,the actors get into a heated discussion over the relevance of the play,which eventually leads to a discourse on issues like man,machine and the conflict between human development and nature. Subsequently,the curtain comes down with the ‘play’ not happening at all.

One of the eminent theatre directors in India today,Bharti claimed that he had aimed for a ‘creative breakthrough’ through the play by throwing questions at the audience. “The existing ideologies have failed us. So we have to collect ideas from all these great thinkers and experiment with it,” he stated. The play also incorporated Bharti’s experience in various forms of theatre,ranging from Japanese and Indian Classical to tribal,folk and Western theatre.