At the NCPA AGP Centrestage Theatre Festival, there are signs of a revival in Marathi drama.
With 15 premiering plays in four languages, the second edition of NCPA AGP Centrestage 2011 offers 15 reasons for theatre-addicts to show up at this festival. And there is another reason to attend: two prominent playwrights, Achyut Vaze and Vikram Kapadia, have emerged from a supposed creative lull with “angry reflections on the state of society as it is, and the direction it’s heading to”. With original plays having become a rarity, the audience will pay special attention to the oracular words of Vaze and Kapadia as delivered by actors on stage.
Vaze’s play, Sadu, Saduchi Bayko, Ani Urlela Jag (Sadu, Sadu’s wife, and The Rest of the World), comes after a 25-year hiatus. This fact was enough to excite Vijay Kenkre, who joined the Awishkar group as a director: “Vaze has his own style. He is what you call an absurdist writer, structurally completely different. He has those one-word dialogue exchanges which are a pleasure to direct.” Sadu, Kenkre says, is a satire on middle-class mentality: “The middle class, according to the play, doesn’t have any political beliefs and it prefers living in the chaos surrounding it.”
Vaze’s name was taken in the same breath as those of Vijay Tendulkar, Mahesh Elkunchvar, Satish Alekar, and G P Deshpande in the 1970s and 1980s. Vaze catapulted into celebrityhood with Sofa-cum-Bed (a coming-of-age story about a young boxer falling in love) while receiving critical acclaim for Chal re Bhoplya, Apnapan and Shadjal. He switched to television at the height of his success as a playwright and director, and produced popular serials like Abhaalmaaya. After 13 years in television, Vaze has taken a job as a creative-writing expert at a school in Pune, so that he can get back to writing plays.
“In the beginning,” says Vaze, “TV was fun. But after a while with a 12-hour-a-day schedule and working with the same story, character, actors, I started getting bored. I started to repeat myself. At one point I realised there is no more scope for creativity here.”
The first play he wrote after returning to play-writing was about the things that bother him most: traffic congestion, pollution, corruption, the intransigent attitude and disillusionment of the middle class (to the extent that “you want to leave everything and just run away but you can’t because it’s some kind of trap”).
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The problems plaguing the city of Mumbai are the central subject of Bombay Talkies, an eight-piece set of monologues by Vikram Kapadia. Kapadia In one of the pieces Kapadia focuses on a man who, no matter “how ugly his life gets, is happy with the system. And when another friend of his tells him that it’s better to be submissive to the establishment because it doesn’t work any other way, then this belief of the protagonist is reinforced.”
Kapadia says: “We benefit from the presence of the Devil. In other words, don’t get rid of it.” He was trained in theatre by Pearl Padamsee, when he was eight years old. In another monologue, Kapadia presents a journalist who wants to purge her system of “journalistic cynicism”.
Kapadia has returned to theatre after almost a decade. He is best known for Black with Equal (2002), a two-act black comedy. In recent the last few years, “to keep the kitchen fire burning and since there was no rational reason to continue in theatre”, Kapadia, like Vaze, moved to films and television. “It was the experience of same old venues,” he says, “the same awful conditions of equipment, with the same lights not working every show, and most importantly the prevalence of borrowed works, which got to me. To direct an award-winning Broadway play wasn’t an inspiring thought.” He adds, “The state of theatre in Maharashtra was pretty bad. I can’t say it’s greatly improved but at least writers have started producing original plays again.”
The NCPA AGP Centrestage Theatre Festival runs through November 26, with 15 new plays in English, Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati. Tickets, Rs 150-1,000, at the NCPA box office and www.bookmyshow.com.
The festival includes a workshop on theatre direction and a street-theatre competition