Half is Still Full

this one need to be reinterpreted,reinvented and kept alive for the coming generations,’’ she says.

Dubey adds that there’s a vast majority of people who are not familiar with theatre and her idea is to introduce path-breaking plays such as Adhe Adhure to a new audience. “When we keep on doing Alfred Tennyson and Anton Chekhov,why not Mohan Rakesh?’’ she asks.

With more than 30 years’ experience in theatre,Dubey has produced,directed and acted in some of most successful plays in English theatre in India — Tumhari Amrita ,Kanyadaan,Dance Like a Man and Wedding Blues. But Adhe Adhure is special since it’s Dubey’s first Hindi play,one that she has been dreaming of doing ever since her Lady Sriram College (LSR) days in Delhi.

“I saw the play at the NSD studio way back when it was done by Manohar Singh. It was then that I decided that when I do theatre,Adhe Adhure will be my first Hindi play. It stayed with me. It took me a long time,but here I am. All my plays are centred around the theme of relationships,and this one’s a scene stealer,’’ she says.

Adhe Adhure is about a life incomplete in itself,that of a middle-class family on the brink of collapse,one that Mohan Rakesh wrote in sheer poetry 40 years back. It was the time when the break-up of the family as it were had begun and Mohan Rakesh chronicled it with such depth and insight that the play becomes a universal commentary on relationships,one that any generation at any point of time can connect with. “The desires,incapability,discontentment,love is spelt out delicately. There’s no black and white; it’s a forward looking vision and that’s precisely what

makes the play undying,’’ Dubey says.

Rhythm,grammar,diction — Dubey says she has worked hard to ensure that the richness of the playwright’s language was never compromised upon. “The language is pure. Unlike in a Hindi film where you have to speak just two lines at one time,here you have to feel and speak the language for more than two hours and yes,it was a lot of hard work,’’ Dubey says,adding that “there was no attempt to change the script in any way,just a bit of editing for reducing the length on stage”.

Universal and modern,Dubey admits that playing Savitri,the powerful female protagonist,was simply

gratifying. “This is one

play which will play forever,’’ she says.