Kolkata Centre for Creativity looks poised to take over the mantle of our city’s national theatre festival by expanding its AMI Arts Festival from its home location to utilize regular auditoriums as well this year. It needs to do two more things in order to attain this distinction unambiguously: vary the selection to include non-Hindi plays from other regions, particularly the south; and renovate the space in KCC with the latest acoustic engineering so that performers do not have to fall back on sound systems. It has given welcome relief to spectators’ posteriors by placing rows of cushions on the wooden seats this time.
The visiting theatre segment of the festival opened with two Hindi productions by D For Drama: Purāne Chāwal and Patna kā Superhero. My last experience of this group hadn’t exactly excited; I found Dhumrapān decidedly regressive. The present pair fared better, though not perfect. Director Sumeet Vyas’s choice to adapt Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys seemed tailormade for senior actors Kumud Mishra and Shubhrajyoti Barat to entertain rather than for thematic reasons. I have never regarded it as one of Simon’s best comedies, mainly because it reminds me too much of his earlier smash, The Odd Couple. The ailing-oldtimers situation bore further echoes of Manav Kaul’s Bali aur Shambhu, where Mishra had acted. Still, Farrukh Seyer and Avinash Gautam Indianized it faithfully, but should have deleted the superfluous, off-colour “item nurse” scene and edited the supposedly famous “doctor vs taxman” failed rehearsals, which grew repetitious and never reached completion. Mishra and Barat enacted forgetfulness and Parkinson’s respectively with fluency.
Patna kā Superhero revealed to us the promising dramatist-director Nihal Parashar, a talented writer who draws on his recollections of his hometown, as he wanted to become the “R. K. Narayan of Patna”. This endearing memoir, told by Manoj, a Class 9 boy in a school virtually for goondas, who hero-worships local strongman Pintu Bhaiya and aspires to join Pintu’s gang, lasts for 70 minutes, lacking just a few more connecting episodes to achieve memorability. Manoj succeeds in his ambition, then takes on the part of the go-between when the illiterate Pintu falls for a girl at first sight, who understandably ultimately rejects him in a letter, and he vanishes. Manoj goes off to college in Delhi and after many years on a return visit they meet again. Ghanshyam Lalsa, the soloist, acts not only Manoj but other characters with flair, bringing out Parashar’s ironic double message of the power of education in a landscape of lawlessness and of a true romantic steadfast in his unrequited love during that time. However, here too, Lalsa had done something similar in Rām Sajivan ki Prem Kathā (2013). Parashar creates his best directorial intervention when music drowns Manoj reading out the letter, so we don’t learn its contents till the end.
1 December 2024