This new play is a protest about how social media treats women

Mallpractice and The Show was staged around the time when a private video of Lavani dancer Gautami Patil was leaked on the internet. The trigger for the play, however, was that such incidents had become frequent, with photographs or videos of women in undergarments or in the nude being leaked on social media, resulting in abuse, blackmail and emotional trauma. Pethe is well-known for directing texts by great playwrights, from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot to Mohan Rakesh’s Ashadh Ka Ek Din to Ramu Ramanathan’s Shabdanchi Rojnishi, but did not opt for a ready script this time.

The play is a result of a collaboration with dancer Rujuta Soman and light designer Pradeep Vaidya, among others. It has been created through conversations and experiments. The result is a hard-hitting work, packed with imageries and symbols, which kept packed audiences in its grip even after the performance ended. A distinctive feature of the play is not only what the artists show but also what they do not, the gaps and silences that audience members fill long after they have left the hall. For instance, the design of the space to which the dancer is confined is a circle. It evokes the ‘Lakshmana Rekha’ and turns the audience seated on three sides into voyeurs.

“We did a lot of experimentation in the last couple of years. For a few years, I was in search of a new idiom. Rujuta had seen my plays and wanted to work with me. Normally, in dance also, they choose a subject from epics, such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, or the ancient fables and orthodox stories though the dancers also want to experiment. Rujuta was also searching for a new language. We came together and started working,” says Pethe.

The piece started with a Ted Talk by Monica Lewinsky, another woman who was sensationalised after her relationship with former US President Bill Clinton was revealed. Lewinsky spoke of social media and women, and Pethe and the team connected this with their experiences. Pethe’s daughter, the well-known actor Parna Pethe, once spotted a camera in a greenroom of a shop and had it removed. “But, the incident remained in my mind,” says Pethe. He started writing the script with the help of Soman.

Rehearsal stretched five months, during which Pethe had to learn the ways of a dancer and Soman had to understand the nature of theatre. They met several Pune-based artists, such as painters Raju Sutar and Vaishali Oak and percussionist Umesh Warbhuvan and kept improvising. “All of us were concerned with how social media behaved with women. We wanted to protest by bringing the issue on the floor,” says Pethe.

The play demands that people come to The Box as it will not travel. This goes against the post-pandemic thinking of most theatre people who prefer to make minimalistic plays with a small cast so that they can tour the country and even overseas.

“I have decided to do more experiments in Pune and travelling from one city to another is a waste of time and money,” says the director.