Pune play steps into manosphere, unmasks ‘nice guy’ as it explores gender tensions in today’s world

In a post-Me Too world, where gender equality is paid lip service in some places and strictly enforced in others, the age-old patriarchy has not vanished, but there is a new kind of social tension between genders. On November 2, two of the city’s most powerful names in theatre, director Anupam Barve and actor Niranjan Pedanekar, will tackle this issue. Their production, Ankush Unchained, will attempt to get across the distorted gender views of Ankush and Ranjan by giving them the stage to talk directly to audiences about the downside of women’s empowerment and the very real threats to men. The 80-minute show will be staged at the intimate space, The Box Too.

‘Losing their ground is making men insecure’

Ankush Unchained is a dark satire that has been adapted in Marathi for the first time from a cutting-edge Edinburgh Fringe play, Angry Alan, by British playwright Penelope Skinner. Barve and Pedanekar understand that they are walking a delicate line, and the challenge has been motivating.

“I had been looking for a solo play and found a couple of plays that sounded very interesting. Angry Alan had an instant relevance attached to it. I had gone through a few reports and articles on how the gap between women and men, especially the young women and men, is widening with time. These days, the young men are getting more misogynistic, while the young women are getting more liberated. Add to this the extreme polarisation that is happening nowadays on social media. Losing their ground is making men insecure and, therefore, they are moving towards extreme manosphere-type ideologies,” says Pedanekar.

Though he had read Angry Alan before watching Adolescence, the Netflix series helped strengthen his conviction about the play. “There are so many people who are not liking that women are equals now or trying to become equals. You can see that everywhere on social media. It’s so out there that you can feel that it’s happening around you also. That’s why Angry Alan was interesting, especially because it was written by a woman,” says Barve.

Humour through irony

The protagonist, Ranjan, is “nice guy, a normal nice guy”, but all the anger that he is harbouring about a variety of things in his life passes through a single narrative channel, an anger towards women. It happened slowly but surely, though Ranjan is, otherwise, somebody who would never cause conflict and even treats his partner equally.

“There is a lot of humour throughout the piece that comes out of irony, not because the protagonist wants to sound funny. If you look at his condition, you see the irony of his situation, and there is a lot of humor like that. A challenge as an actor is to really feel the pangs of his situation while not trying to be humorous,” says Pedanekar.

As Ranjan goes through a slow online radicalisation by Ankush, he talks to his partner, his son, with people around him and to himself. “A lot of the stuff that Ranjan says is so offensive, yet he has to appear likeable. That’s where the power of the play lies. The writer has kept it on that thin line, where the protagonist is getting on your nerves but you also feel pity towards him. That keeps on happening all the time till the end,” says Pedanekar.

He and Barve have worked together in four plays. “This is not merely a solo, where a person goes on narrating his story. There is a duality, with the character quickly going into a situation and having both sides of the conversation, sometimes in the first person, sometimes in third, sometimes in a present continuous, sometimes as a reference to the past, and then snapping out. Sometimes, he takes cognizance of the audience in the present. I found this very interesting,” says Barve.

Sure, there is a chance that the intent of the play will be misunderstood as an endorsement of misogyny. “We have had people who feel that whatever Ranjan says and thinks makes sense. We can have a dialogue with an individual, but when the play goes out to an audience, one doesn’t know what is about to happen. But I have always believed that what you want to do is your prerogative, and what the audience wants to feel is their prerogative. I cannot control what they feel. But, if they hang in long enough, they will see the result of the radicalisation on the protagonist,” says Pedanekar.