A Man’s World

The play Roop Aroop depicts the internal conflict of a male actor who can no longer play a woman's role.

To make ones presence felt in any field requires immense hard work and dedication. After achieving that,to see it slip away from you is even more difficult to deal with. The male actors of the North-Indian nautanki suffered when in the 1950s,women came to the forefront to claim their space in acting. The male actors who would portray women characters on stage were eventually sidelined. Roop Aroop,a play written and directed by National School of Drama alumnus,Tripurari Sharma,traces this tussle between an accomplished male performer who had been enacting a woman’s role for years and the woman who has just stepped on stage for the role which was denied to her till then. The play will be presented in the city on March 7.

With the advent of the cinema culture,the country witnessed many changes. The inclusion of women in plays was one of them. I have tried to address the internal conflict of an actor who is replaced by someone who is more biologically fitting,” says Sharma. Men,who perfected the art of playing women on stage,quit acting when this happened in the 50s. “Some became comedians and others just vanished. It was an era of rejection for some and new found glory for others, she adds.

This transition brought in a change in acting. Although the men moved out,the notion of the perfect woman which they had created remained the same. We cannot blame the women for not being able to live up to that style and level of acting,” Sharma feels.

Happy Ranjit Sahoo,Sharmas student,plays Roopmati,an actor caught in this internal strife. Roopmati is a character who was more womanly than a woman. He is the torchbearer of those men who created that perfect female character. It was painful for him to part with this space, says Sahoo. He won the Best Actor award at the Mahindra Excellence in Theater Awards in 2010 for this character. Roop Aroop was staged at the International Conference of Women,Mumbai,two years back and has completed over 50 shows till now.

How was the experience of directing a man in a woman’s role? We need to share a comfortable relationship to dissolve all such inhibitions in a creative pursuit. Ranjit was very keen to play Roopmati and that made it easier, says Delhi-based Sharma who hasnt visited Pune since 1984. She is thrilled to come back to the city of Bal Gandharva. Pune is embedded with memories of the legend,Bal Gandharva,a man who had perfected every womans role, she says.

(The play will be staged at the Ishanya Amphitheatre on March 7)

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