This year’s laudably-expanded Ami Arts Festival organized by Kolkata Centre for Creativity brought a clutch of Hindi–Urdu theatre productions from Mumbai and Delhi, minus one thanks to the Indigo fiasco. The quartet I saw (overlapping performances at two venues denied me the opportunity to see more) comprised a couple of two-handers and a couple of solo shows.
Dastangoi Collective’s Dāstān-e-Ret-Samādhi dramatizes Geetanjali Shree’s prizewinning cross-border saga, Ret-Samādhi, as a dāstān narrative for storytelling in Urdu. Mahmood Farooqui has done this with postcolonial fiction before, for example with Rāg Darbāri and Haroun and the Sea of Stories, but his Ret-Samādhi marks his first attempt with a recent novel. The 80-year-old Dadi’s Mantoesque liberation made compelling listening, apart from the sheer display of memory and stamina over two hours, albeit shared equally with co-dāstāngo Poonam Girdhani (photo), who matched Farooqui’s proven eloquence, as well as manifested the female characters. Even though we cannot expect everything in the source to find place within 120 minutes, I did feel that Farooqui downplays the violence and the political criticism in its writing, and inserts superfluous metaliterary quotes. I also think they could have better preserved Dastangoi’s intimate ambience by abjuring mike headsets in the small KCC gallery—as demonstrated by veteran thespian Makarand Deshpande two days later, throwing his voice effortlessly.
D for Drama returns to their erratic ways with Sānp Sirhi, Akarsh Khurana’s massively reductive murder of Anthony Shaffer’s classic crime thriller, Sleuth, slashing it to 75 minutes. One wonders why, because both actors—Kumud Mishra and Sumeet Vyas—have enough expertise to carry off the chilling gamesmanship for its full 140 minutes. Instead, director Shubhrajyoti Barat jettisons most of the twists and turns after the detective’s entrance in Act 2, even the revelation of the husband (Mishra)’s impotence and the supposed seduction and killing of his girlfriend by his wife’s lover (Vyas). While the titular metaphor of the ancient Indian game of Snakes and Ladders and contemporary updates like the use of mobile phones click, why leave out the now-highly topical subject of the husband’s racist putdown of the lover’s immigrant background? As for the set, one of Shaffer’s most grotesque props, the life-size moving–laughing automaton, only serves the purpose of a decorative curio.
The two Hindi–English monodramas from Mumbai exemplify the self-indulgence of many self-directed solo actors who fancy their talents as playwrights and end up with over-written scripts that test our patience. Both Jyoti Dogra and Makarand Deshpande have the best of intentions in awakening the social sensitivity of the audience, but fail to hold our attention beyond a certain point.
Dogra’s Māns is self-reflexive, employing her own physique to criticize society’s fixation on “ideal” body image influencing us to conform. Although it touches upon such serious concerns as fattism, ageism, body shaming, bingeing, dieting, fashion and menopause, it goes on for far too long (two hours), belabouring these issues when editing could have made it much sharper. Some episodes strike home, like those on Botox and beauty products or the fad of taking selfies for social media, whereas the so-called “fun sequences” with obligatory gyrations do not merit inclusion. In addition, her vocal inability to adjust to KCC’s poor acoustics resulted in many of her lines dropping unheard.
As mentioned above, Deshpande overcame this problem with his delivery, but Piyakkad quickly became a non-starter. Do we really need convincing that all drunkards are not bad people? Must we learn of Deshpande’s differentiation between a sharābi and a piyakkad? His text illustrates the latter from three persons whom he met—sorry, pathetic tales of discrimination no doubt, but nothing out of the ordinary worthy of narrating. Although thankfully shorter in runtime at 90 minutes, Piyakkad stumbles histrionically because, first, to act drunk is one of the easiest things to do; and, second, this early stereotyped slurred-and-tottering performance gradually and not at all credibly normalizes into perfect sobriety later.
(9 December 2025)