Twists in the Tale

At the festival,The Hamlet Quartet has company when it comes to experiment-rich plays. There is Theatre Roots and Wings’ Sahyande Makan: The Elephant Project,Ranan’s Equus and Sridhar/Thayil’s The Flying Wallas: Opera Noir. Dialogues hardly feature in The Elephant Project as Japanese actress Micari transforms into an elephant.

The new production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus is replete with music and movements while Opera Noir is a dark Indian twist to opera. “We have some very young groups presenting interesting work during the festival alongside the groups which are using traditional mediums and expressions,” says Sanjna Kapoor,director of Prithvi Theatre.

In the script of The Hamlet Quartet,written by Kashav Kumar,a number of insignificant characters in the original play have gained prominence. Their dialogues have been created; the length has been curtailed to 1 hour-20 minutes; and props,mostly surreal in nature,have been introduced. All these have been done keeping the original plot intact. But the most striking of Grover’s experiments is the profuse use of multimedia.

“I have been working on making multi-media a part of theatrical experience. In The Hamlet Quartet,we have a television set on the stage which plays live feed as well as pre-recorded scenes of Ophelia’s madness,” says Grover. The play is very visual with specially treated sound giving it an extra edge. Very few will be able to guess that for the final sword fight sequence in the play,they have treated the sound of pumping an inflated bed.

Equus too has undergone a radical change in its presentation. It continues to be dark and disturbing. But thanks to director Vikram Iyengar,the play by Kolkata-based theatre group Ranan uses dance,music and movement to carry the story forward. Iyengar,a Kathak dancer,says,“Drama is all about telling a story; visualising words on a page in a 3D space. For me,a dancer,this aspect of visualisation through the confluence of words,bodies in space,dance and design becomes my theatre.”

For its second production,Kerala’s Theatre Roots and Wings zeroed in on a Malayalam poem Sahyande Makan written by Vyloppilly Sreedhara Menon in 1944. The play,directed by Sankar Venkateswaran,unfolds the inner world of a bull elephant,who is bewildered with his nostalgic wildlife fantasy and immediate reality of being a slave of man. The multilingual project marks juxtaposition of Japanese performance techniques with Indian and is subtitled in English,Malayalam and Japanese.

While the Mumbai audience has been mostly oblivious to the work these young groups,they are pretty familiar with opera noir of Sridhar/Thayil (the name adopted by singer Suman Sridhar and poet Jeet Thayil for their collaborative work). They had first got a taste of the duo’s opera noir at the Prithvi Theatre’s Celebrating Poetry festival. “We have now expanded it to an hour long performance,” says Thayil. The Flying Wallas will present a lyrical conversation between a soprano and a ghost about God,murder and showbiz in a stripped-down contemporary noir production. “Opera has become a white,upper class form of entertainment,of excluding much of the world. This is the opposite. It’s for everyone,” adds Thayil.