Space Odyssey

YOU8217;RE either guffawing or frozen in your seat while watching Harvest. Manjula Padmanabhan8217;s play, currently touring the US, is a macabre fable laced with a brand of black humour that8217;s vaguely reminiscent of George Orwell8217;s 1984. Padmanabhan mustered up the play in great secrecy in 1997. 8216;8216;I had this idea for a long time. Then I read the brief for a competition, which was 8216;the human condition in the next millennium8217;, and I got down to it,8217;8217; says Padmanabhan.

The competition was for one of the world8217;s more lucrative cultural awards8212;the Alexander S Onassis Public Benefit Foundation for International Understanding Award, better known as the Onassis Award. Harvest beat over a thousand entries to bag the Rs 90 lakh prize. Soon after, Govind Nihalani8217;s adaptation of Harvest, called Deham, premiered at the London Film Festival.

Recently staged at Berkeley and Swarthmore in the US, Harvest is set in a Mumbai chawl circa 2010. Seduced by the wealth of the West, a family enters into a grisly pact with America. Its three members barter their identities bodies, minds and organs for the good life and eventually destroy themselves. Part of its US run is another production by the East Coast Artistes Group, New York, in January 2006.

Padmanabhan, however, isn8217;t upbeat about the play8217;s US run. Not even about Harvest being the first Indian play to be performed in Berkeley since 1914. The Delhi-based cartoonist and author, known for her dogged artistic vision, is irked by the way director Sudipto Chatterjee, an assistant professor at the Department of Theatre, Dance and Performance at the University of California, Berkeley, has improvised on her writing. 8216;8216;I was deeply disturbed,8217;8217; says Padmanabhan. 8216;8216;The director has permitted his actors to use a number of Hindi-isms such as arre, beta, etc, which I find very hard to accept8212;I don8217;t feel the need to underline the fact that I8217;m Indian or South Asian, it is utterly unimportant. I want to universalise the experience.8217;8217;

Padmanabhan grew up in Stockholm, Geneva, Karachi and Teheran with her diplomat father, returning to work in Mumbai before moving to Delhi in 1985. 8216;8216;As far as I8217;m concerned, I speak an Indian language called English,8217;8217; she says. 8216;8216;Ethnic trappings bother me.8217;8217;

Chatterjee8217;s response to Padmanabhan8217;s accusations: 8216;8216;To put it bluntly, if she feels the play has rarely been performed the way she wants it, why not rewrite it? She accuses the production of taking liberties with her script, liberties that I will argue are within the standards of performance practice.8217;8217;

The ongoing fracas apart8212;although it has ruffled feathers in the South Asian theatre community on the West Coast8212;Padmanabhan is hoping the New York version will be closer to the Greek one. 8216;8216;It was austere but also playful and inventive,8217;8217; she tells us, 8216;8216;but of course they too will be looking for their own idiom.8217;8217;

The original three-act narrative goes: Jobless Om Prakash lives with his worn-out wife Jaya, a younger brother, who is a prostitute, and a poison-tongued mother. To ward off the family8217;s misery, Om queues up outside Inter Planta, an American organ-buying firm.

Once Om commits his life and limbs to them, they provide his family with a 8216;8216;Western life8221;, including daily long-distance calls on a video screen. As a blonde from California squeals on the screen to her Indian donors, you8217;re frightened as much as tickled.

The chief merit of Harvest is its sharp dialogues which, Padmanabhan confesses, haven8217;t been diluted in any of the versions. 8216;8216;If you take my play apart, it is about lines,8217;8217; she says. A background in dialogue writing comes from Padmanabhan being a professional comic strip writer. Her comic strip, Suki, has appeared in The Sunday Observer and The Pioneer, and her last book, Double Talk, is a collection of her Bombay strip by the same name.