The theatre performance ended with a glum director announcing in chaste Hindi,The play never happened. Incomplete,however,was the word farthest from the audiences minds. Bhanu Bhartis Tamasha Na Hua,staged at Sri Ram Centre on Tuesday with Chief Minister Sheila Dixit in the audience,had proved to be intellectually stimulating and thought provoking. Tamasha Na Hua,a tribute to Rabindranath Tagore on his 150th birth anniversary,was structured as a play within a play. It began with a theatre group rehearsing Tagores 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 Tagores admiration for Mahatma Gandhi. In Bhartis interpretation,the actors get into a heated debate over the relevance of the play. This leads to a discourse on issues like 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 said that he had aimed for a creative breakthrough through the play by throwing questions at the audience. The existing ideologies have failed us, he said. So we have to collect ideas from all these great thinkers and experiment with it. The play also incorporated Bhartis experiences in various forms of theatre,ranging from Japanese to Indian tribal and folk. The play will be staged at SRC today
