Festival season for the performing arts has returned. Little Thespian, who turn 25 this year, inaugurate their national Jashn-e-Rang on Sunday. Uma Jhunjhunwala wrote and directed their latest play Hazaran Khwahishan, an original musical romance based on Rajasthani folk stories and styles. The dreams of a pair of village lovers get shattered when the resident Seth decides to raise the girl as his daughter – and obviously disapproves of the rustic boy who has no livelihood.
Jhunjhunwala initiates a large brood of youngsters to inject fresh blood into not just her troupe but also Hindi/Urdu theatre in Kolkata. The leads (Kusum Verma and Neelanjan Chatterjee) reveal promise but meet their match in the bellicose belle (Parbati Shaw) who fancies the boy and takes advantage of the situation. Senior actors Sagar Sengupta (the generous Seth) and Heena Parwez (the girl’s greedy mother) bring experience to the mix. Murari Ray Chowdhury scores authentic Rajasthani music but the production does not qualify as a musical because all the songs are recorded and lip-synced – bad training for young talents. Their dancing also needs much more practice in collective formation.
The five-day Intimate Theatre Festival organized by Bibhaban and Proscenium got underway with Vijay Tendulkar’s Sakharam Binder rewritten by a new group, Black Curtain. Director Aman Jaiswal and his youthful team take the audacious step of converting it into a compact comedy in which Lakshmi doesn’t figure at all and, instead of Sakharam murdering Champa, she instigates his friend Daud to kill Sakharam, her Faujdar husband and an unsuspecting postman (an unnecessary overkill). The finale recalls that of a Shakespearean tragedy littered with corpses, except here they pile on top of each other. Nothing wrong in parodying classics, those of Shakespeare offering many precedents.
The exuberance of the actors in pummelling one another, no holds barred, reminds me of Kathputli puppet slapstick. While Aarav Kumar’s expressions as Sakharam are priceless, Krishna Sonika (Champa) lords over all like a virago. Her suitors get uproariously drunk, Pankaj Yadav (the husband) topping this category over Aarav and Ravi Jain (Daud). Jaiswal should optimize intimate-theatre impact by placing the audience on all sides.
(From The Times of India, 15 November 2019)