Nona and Item adjudged the best at Meta Festival

The 13th Meta Festival ended with a grand reception at the Taj Man Singh hotel. The awards were presented earlier in the evening at the Kamani Auditorium.

The Best Play award was shared by Nona and Item. Item talked  about the underbelly of the Hindi cinema is its B-grade films, which were popular before multiplexes. It also won the Best Actor in the Lead Role Male for Sainath Ganuwad. Based on the life of a B-grade film actress Sapna who, while exposing the objectification of the female body, also shows her sensitivity to doing scenes on the bed, Item came across as an interesting play. Bed was an important object in the play as it took the centrestage in every other scene. Sainath as a sensitive narrator introduced us to all the milestones of the B-grade film actress who becomes hysterical when she is out of luck with role.

Nona, a Malayalam play, was directed by Jino Joseph, who also won the best director and the best stage design awards for it. Joseph’s play, set in rural Kerala, was about social stratification and pseudo nationalism impacting Indian society today. Amateurs in the village collaborate to assert their rights to voice opinions through the power of theatre. The sets of the play also reflected the play’s rebellious content.

The other play that created waves was Shikhandi, written and directed by Faezeh Jalali. It spoke about the story of the “in-betweens”, taking Shikandi, the killer of Bhishma Pitama of the Mahabharata, as the role model. She was born as Amba, one of the three sisters, who has been brought up as a male. She has a sex change on the night of her wedding. The play questions “maleness”, “femaleness” and everything in-between. It won the Best Ensemble Play award. The Best Actor in a Supporting Role-Male award was bagged by Tushar Pandey and Best Actor in a Supporting Role-Female was bagged by Shrishti Shrivastava.

Best Choreography was won by Karuppu for Mani Bharathi and the heroine of the play was mentioned for her role as the Best Actor in a Lead Role Female.

Kumud Misra also got the Best Actor in the Supporting Role Male award for Muktidham, a play set in the 8th Century AD, in a math (monastery) at a time when the Buddhist Pala kings were the dominant rulers of the northern and eastern India. Muktidham also won the award of Best Light Design for Anmol Vellani.

Play Hojang Taret was a Greek tragedy about the ethical ambiguities of the fraternal conflicts that led to the destruction of the city of Thebes. Based on Phoenician Women, the play is a tragedy written by Euripides, between 411 and 409 BC. Jacosta, the mother, is played by Kh. Sanatombi who won the Best Actor in a Lead Role-Female award. The Best Actor in a Lead Role-Male award was won by Oasis Sougaijam who is also the director of the play. The dialogue of this play was very loud but I suppose that’s the best way to approach a Greek play.

I felt a bit bad for Comfort Women an Untold History not winning a single award as I feel it did deserve one.

Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, presented by Theatre Artistree, in Chandra Keerthi B’s direction was a amateurish production with large portions edited with no reason at all. The story did not feature Aszdak the judge as a character at all.

Faisal Alkazi presented his latest play The Gathered Leaves by Andrews Keatley at the Indian Habitat Centre. The play was about an affluent family in Delhi where the patriarch invites all the nine members of his three-generation family to celebrate his 75th birthday. Gautam is the eldest son played by Ashish Dhameja who is married to Deepika (Nandini Shah) and has two children Siddharth (Angad Ohri and Ritvik Bhagat) and Anoushka, played by Aditi Parashar. The younger son is Gaurav played by Sanjay Desai and his sister is Rajasvi (Malini Kumar / Gayatri Rattan) who has come back to the house after 17 years with an illegitimate daughter Aurelia (Anushka Mehra).

Rajasvi who studied in JNU while in Delhi got pregnant much to the dismay of her father, Kaushal, well played by Yogesh Verma while her mother Saroj (Radhika Alkazi) understood her daughter’s predicament. The result was that Rajasvi meets her mother every year at Delhi, so the daughter is quite comfortable with the mother. Yogesh Verma as Kaushal carridthe play on his shoulders with a sensitive portrayal of a father who longs to come close to his family, but is unable to do so because of his unforgiving nature and his expectations from his family. He is particularly ashamed of his younger son Gaurav’s lack of education and his irresponsible attitude towards life. He thinks Gaurav is mad. Gaurav has a very fine imagination which takes him to unknown spaces where he dwells and treats them as real.

On the night of his birthday Kaushal sits in the drawing room in his favourite chair and receives presents from everybody and assesses each one for its commercial value and discovers that the painting of the eye given by Gurav was of no value at all.

Sanjeev and Ashish both are well within the family structure as is Saroj played by Radhika. Deepika tells Gaurav on the same night that she is having an affair and that was the reason why she would not share a bed with him. It was an interesting play rather well-crafted and well-enacted, but did it have to be in English? Wouldn’t Hindi be as powerful a language to convey the same emotions and ideas?

The writer is a theatre personality and a well-known critic