Agni Aur Barkha: A complex but lively tale of love, lust and sacrifice
Agni Aur Barkha, Girish Karnad’s play on love, lust, power and sacrifice, directed by K.S Rajendaran, was a lively production with excellent performances by Rakesh Warware as Aravasu and Arun Kumar Keshav as Rabhiya as his father.
Amongst the girls, Nittilai, Aravasu’s girlfriend, was a shade better than Vishakha, Aravasu’s sister-in-law married to the elder brother, Paravasu. In a complicated plot, where the Brahmarashtras conjured Rabhiya to kill Yavakiri (Paravasu’s cousin), who just returned after 12 years of tapasya and prayer to Lord Shiva, is in love with Paavasu’s wife, Vishakha, and comes back to claim her.
Nittilai and Aravasu are lovers but unfortunately, Aravasu is a little too late in reaching her village to get permission to marry her. She is married off to somebody else in the tribe. Finally, the play ends where it begins, with a prayer mandap and Paravasu doing a yagya for rain in a drought ridden village.
Paravasu dies in the fire and there is rain in the village as Aravasu promises to let Nittilai go and does not want her back in his life.
The play was well directed and featured some good performances from the actors like Kunwar Himanshu Tyagi as Andhak and Nitin Choudhary as Yavakri.
Tughlaq, by Girish Karnad was also performed by the same group in a Hindi translation by B.V. Karanth and was staged using K. Madvane’s direction. The play was performed earlier with Om Shiv Puri and later with Manohar Singh as Tughlaq by E. Alkazi.
Tuhglaq, as we all know, was an idealist who wanted to move the capital from Delhi to Daulatabad as it was more central to his Indian empire. He also issued copper coins to be of equivalent value as the silver ones. Instead of taking people into his confidence, Tughlaq gave orders thus estranging the masses from him.
His dream to find an everlasting empire fashioned after his vision in order to transform humanity is like “cattle”, although he hopes to “make men out of some of them and create from them a superior race”.
Madvane handled the text well, and created some interesting satirical situations such as how the group of sheikhs behaved when they came to beg the emperor to not move from the capital.
The production was efficient and Ayaz Khan as Tughalq was quite effective.
Barani, played by Kunwar Himanshu Tyagi, Nazeeb by Saksham Shukla and Azam by Saif Ansari also gave good supporting performances. The idea of the wheeled broad staircase leading up to the throne was inventive, especially when it was moved around in other directions to imply a change of location and also Tughlaq’s moods.
Kaali Shalvar, the story written by Sadat Hasan Manto, was dramatized and directed by Atul Satya Kaushik from the Film and Theater Society for the Summer Theatre Festival 2017. It is a story of a prostitute who breaks the ethics of the oldest profession in the world so that she can have a dress to wear on Muharram. She gives favours to a resourceful man whom she finds irresistible in repartee. The story of Sultana makes you smile and at the same time takes you into the human areas of darkness.The production had a lot of qawalis by the Nizami Brothers and some plaintive ghazals by Begum Akhtar sung by Latika Jain.
AADYAM’s third festival featured Rage Production’s Anand Express, directed by Nadir Khan and written by Carl Miller. Three teenagers, Kenny played by Sidhartha Kumar, Wasim played by Chaitanya Sharma and Neeraj played by Vivan Shah are all set to fufill their friend Anand’s dream to visit Anand, in Gujarat and to establish Anand in Anand. When he dies unexpectedly in an accident, they take his ashes on the mission to honour their friendship and to set right all that has gone wrong. The race to get Anand to Anand takes our teenage heroes on an endearing, exhilarating and funny journey in which Anand’s ghost also joins them.
With Agya Lahiri’s lights, Fali Unwala’s set design, Akarsh Khurana’s Indian adaptation, Pushan Kriplani’s visual content, Kaizad Gheza’s sound design, Malaika Chaudhury’s and Ashima Belapurkar’s costume design,nAyaz Ansari as the production manager, production and sound by Varun Bangera made this Rage Production very entertaining. The actors were all very good.
Neeraj was sentimental, Kenny, a moralist and Wasim was a very good mimic who also played a woman at one point in time, and Sukant Goel as Anand’s ghost was very effective in leading the actors to various points of silliness.
