The last one week has been great fun.Thanks to Rangashankara for its wonderful theatre festival.deponti and me managed to catch up with a couple of really good plays.

The first one was The Suit directed by Neelam Mansingh who got the idea of staging this play after watching its original south african version at the London International Festival of Theatre. The play deals with a cruel moral dilemma faced by a young married punjabi couple. The couple were living together happily until one day when the husband discovers his wife in bed with her lover. The lover flees, leaving behind his suit.Though the wife expects him to be physically violent at that moment, the husband doesn’t act that way. Instead the husband chooses to torture her using the suit. He forces her to treat that abandoned suit as a guest and expects it to be treated with all respect by accompanying them even on walks, dinner table and even at social events.By this time , the wife had realised her mistake and was repenting for it.But still the mental torture continued.Finally the wife couldn’t take it anymore when he asked her to make love to the suit one day.It was an amazing performance.

The second one was Ram Ganesh Kamatham’s Crab. We had really liked the performances in his previous play “Creeper” and thought we should catch up with this as well.The play directed by Arghya Lahiri is about the lives of four twenty-somethings entangled in a some relationship problems. Zamiel, an obsessive climber has been having some problem with his girlfriend Jojo who doesn’t want him to climb anymore after his recent accident at Ramanagaram. He isn’t physically fit to do mountaineering anymore. It was that crab of his which had saved his life. But still Zamiel just wants to continue climbing because he loves to do that.In between all these he meets this journalist Priya who loves climbing too and ends up having a one night relationship with her.Things are in a mess.Jojo’s cousin Rocky tries to kill Zamiel in their trek to Kumaraparvata who also liked her.Zamiel is still alive.When things dont work out,Jojo gets married to another person. Zamiel again goes on to his trek and again meets up with an accident but unfortunately this time the same (now damaged) crab doesn’t save him. The performances were simply amazing. Ram is the man for serious plays. The sets involved some good stunts too which brought it close to reality. Ah well to quote a dialogue from the play.. Anyone who’s moved in a relentlessly straight line will tell you things move in circles.. Just loved this line.

This time Rangashankara had introduced a program called “Other Voices”. An intimate theatre as they define it.. A different kind of performance.. One that can move into any space.. into heads …with whispers,real whispers.A performance in close up.. one that can show wrinkles and all,one that can enter a moment,stay there and ‘hold’ it.. The late evening play was just open for 25 people and the tickets were sold just half an hour before the show starts. We were planning to go for it on Monday but we had no chances for gettings the tickets and it also didn’t make sense for us to wait till 9.30pm after watching the afternoon 3.30pm show. But we were really happy when the repeat performance was announced on Friday. The play 1, Madhav Baug,written by the eminent Marathi playwright-director Chetan Datar and directed by Mariam Jetpurwala staged in a small room on the 3rd floor of Rangashankara is the story of the middle-aged Vyjayanti (played by popular actress Revathi), who has three grown up sons. She loved her youngest son the most who was born out of a mistake which had led to her divorce too. Since then she has been staying with her parents.On a rainy day in Mumbai, she bunked her office and decided to stay at home enjoying the hot coffee and bhajjis with some good music and rains.When she thinks of calling her youngest son home,a stranger rings her up to inform her that her son had made his son Manish commit suicide.This came as a sudden shock to her.She couldn’t believe it. She quickly tries to browse through his cupboard to see if there is something she can find out during which she discovers a lot of male photographs lying under his bed, a gold pendant with the name Manish in it. She doesn’t want to come to a conclusion about anything esp his sexual preferences. Coincidently her youngest son turns up at the door and he is confused now. After some engaging conversation with his mother, he hands over a pen drive to his mother telling her that it has all that he wanted to tell her and leaves home promising to get back after a while. It was his dairy and she patients and sits and reads all of it. The story goes on explore the nature of choices and how a mother understands her son’ problems.I am lost for words to describe the lovely performance by Revathi.AND it was her first theatrical performance too. Simply amazing.The location of the play made it really special. It was as if Vyjayanti was sitting across and tell us her story. Truly an intimate theatre.The Hindu has a very detailed review of the play here.

Ah.. AND now waiting to watch the next set of plays in November :D