In the past, few films have owed their origin to a stage play. Famous plays like Shantata Court Chalu Aahe, Kamala (Vijay Tendulkar) Party, Holi (Mahesh Elkunchwar), Gharonda (Shanker Shesh), Agnivarsha (Girish Karnad), and A Muggy Night in Mumbai (Mahesh Dattani) have been turned into films, with only limited success. And the recent star-studded Aankhen, directed by Vipul Shah and based on Gujarati play Andhado Pato (Aatish Kapadia), succeeded in completely disguising its stage origin. So it’s exciting to learn that Vijay Ghatge is turning Shafat Khan’s Shobhayatra—one of the most popular Marathi plays in recent times—into a film. Ghatge, who made the telefilm Ganuraya (based on C T Khanolkar’s story) years ago, was also associated with Vijay Tendulkar and Bhimsain on some projects. He collaborated with friend and playwright Shafat Khan on some NFDC scripts too. But this is his first film. After a stint as a sugarcane farmer on ancestral land in Kolhapur, the self-effacing and soft-spoken Ghatge has finally got this self-funded project off the ground.Shobhayatra, the Marathi play, blends social satire with dark comedy. It’s about an underworld don organising an Independence Day procession with ‘freedom fighters’, and the event which goes dreadfully awry. The film, made in Hindi (“the Marathi film industry is in bad shape”), has an interesting cast of theatre and film actors like Kishore Kadam, Divya Dutta, Denzil Smith and Vineet Kumar.The problems of adapting a complex play into a film were somewhat reduced because Khan had already worked on the film version before the play went into production (directed by Ganesh Yadav). The highly acclaimed Marathi play was subsequently translated and performed in Hindi, English, Gujarati and other languages.“The problems with a play are always the verbosity and limited movement in a confined space,” he admits. “We have worked around both by developing the existing characters, introducing new ones, taking some of the action outside the warehouse where the play is set, and cutting to the past. But we wanted to do a film that had social significance, along with entertainment.”“The play was too subtle,” continues Ghatge. “For the film we have made the narrative so simple, at one level even a child can understand it. But the subtext is there for the mature audience to appreciate. On stage, actors tend to play to the gallery, to compete for laughs. In the film, I have maintained a very realistic style—nothing is exaggerated or stagey. The camera moves a lot, there is a lot of inter-cutting and no stylisation at all. Also, these days, language in the theatre is more colloquial and that helps, too.”With Pradeep Muley doing the sets and costumes, Alok Upadhyay as cinematographer and Jabeen Merchant editing, Ghatge is happy with the result of this combined effort. “I had confidence in the play’s potential to be converted into a good film, that’s why I invested my own money. And my team has put their heart into this,” he says. The film is almost complete and will be readyby mid-July.
