After several years the Sahitya Kala Parishad took on the onus of staging a youth festival for the young theatre directors in Delhi. Many years ago, I think in the seventies, the Yuva Utsav was an important event on the Sahitya Kala Parishad’s calendar. The festival was presented in Sapru House under four sections — dance, theatre, music and art. The Sapru House lawns were alit with the works of upcoming artists while the auditorium was abuzz with the sounds of bells, tabla and other musical instruments for over two weeks. While there are plans to revive the longer version of the festival, this was a good beginning. Eight young directors were invited to participate in the festival which concluded on February 20. The plays were known works by well-known authors. The opening play was Qaid-e-Hayat, written by Surendra Verma. This play has not been performed for sometime and kudos to Danish Iqbaal for taking up a difficult theme in pure Urdu. In act one, we find the great Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib in dire straits, beleaguered by creditors who are all baying for his blood even as he prepares to go to Kolkata for a last attempt to regain his pension. In the second act, we see him with his beloved Katiba who is writing his diwan for publication. Their love and longing for each other is well portrayed by Danish who plays Ghalib and Nidhi Misra as Katiba. The play was marked by excellent acting and neatly designed sets. The final act captured the urgency of Ghalib’s desire to visit his beloved when he is informed that she is dying. Neil Simon’s play Rumours was presented as Khusar Pusar in a valid adaptation in Hindi by Kuljeet Singh who also directed the agile cast. The play is a whodunit with a twist. We know all along that the host has shot himself in the ear on his first wedding anniversary. But his wife is missing from the party they have jointly thrown. The high-flying guests want to keep the happenings away from the police, to which end they land themselves in a series of hilarious situations. The play was a no-nonsense comedy with all the actor chipping in. Bada Natakiya Kaun, directed by Prakash Jha, was slightly removed from the mainstream in the sense that it took the author’s (Avinash Chandra Mishra ) original script and played it in the style of a musical type nautanki. The nat and nati become the main characters Phulwan whose reputation as a good-for- nothing Bhand (actor) does not prevent him from marrying Sonia. The bone of contention between the two protagonists, Phulwa and the village chief Dhanraj, is a piece of land gifted to the former by another old villager who hopes Phulwa will look after him ands his childless wife in their old age. The presentation relied on the performances by the actors who did not let the director down. Though there was some amount of hamming by Anil Mishra and his Hisabi Praveen Kumar The other actors, Mukesh Jha, Sonia Jha and Dipak Thakur, played well. Rajiv Ranjan as the son of the village chief was over-the-top. Amongst the plays seen at the festival, Pratigya Yaugandhar-anyan, based on the play by the Sanskrit playwright Bhasa was different. Directed by Bhoomikeshwar Singh, it was staged in the traditional style with a large input of Chhau movements. The play is ostensibly about King Pradyut of Ujjaini and his dethronement by the able King Vatsraj Udayan of neighbouring Kaushambi. It is really a play about the great chief minister of Kaushambi Yaugandh-rayan’s brave efforts to make it happen. The play opened on a rather long-drawn-out battle sequence in Chhau. The chief minister’s vow to be succeed in freeing his king from the Ujjaini is fulfilled but not before he had employed several ploys, including play-acting as a mad Brahmin. The actor playing Yaugandhrayan, Deepak Kumar, was most effective in his role as were the actors playing his assistants, Rajesh Shrivastava and Deen Dayal Dubey. There was a moment of hilarity when a soldier goes to look for the mahout of the elephant who is required to go with princess Vasavdutta. The sequence of the mahout who is found in the liquor den gave a chance to Kailash Kumar to show his histrionics otherwise locked in his role as Vatsraj. Except for the scene where the couple fall in love when Vasavduttais praying in the temple, the entire romance between her and Vatsraj till the final elopement is merely described in the text.
