Drama from Real Life

Present Concerns

Mein Hoon Yusuf Aur Yeh Hai Mera Bhai (pictured), which won the Best Play at the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards this year, explores the possibilities of love in an environment of upheaval and refugee crises. Sunil Shanbag worked on the dying tiatr tradition in Loretta, where a vivacious young girl loses her heart to the warm social culture of a Goan village. The biggest production of the year was Khasakkinte Ithihasam (The Legends of Khasak), by Deepan Sivaraman, which opened to thousands in a village in Kerala. It retold a classical text, provoked conversations and inspired a graffiti art movement.

Cultural Handshake

A new challenge to veterans of the stage came in the form of the play, White Rabbit, Red Rabbit. Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour created the script when he was banned from travelling out of the country. Among its attractions is that the solo actor is handed the script in a sealed envelope before the audience. Rajit Kapur, Arundhati Nag, Anurag Kashyap, Sudhanva Deshpande and Danish Husain are among the actors who have taken up the challenge and sipped from a poisoned — or not — glass. Another iconic play to be staged in India was Krishnan’s Dairy, a solo by Jacob Rajan, which is as much about Indian immigrants in New Zealand battling cultural shocks and chilly weather as about arranged marriages and love.

World Order

THE new artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe in London, Emma Rice (pictured), started her innings by saying, “If anybody bended gender it was Shakespeare, so I think it just takes a change of mindset.” She started by breaking the rules — especially of theatre lighting — and has, reportedly, been asked to leave. She did, however, create a Bollywood-ised adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream this year. It featured music of David Bowie and Beyonce, among others, and former cabaret star Meow Meow as Titania. The British stage also saw the return of director Peter Brook to The Mahabharata after 30 years with a new play, titled Battlefield. In a comment on a war-torn world, Yudhisthira confronts the carnage that his armies have wrought on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. Another British play, Zindabad, revisited the Partition from the perspective of the Europeans living on the Pakistan side. For Potterheads, the biggest theatre extravaganza was Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which, like all things JK Rowling, was XXL in terms of crowd mania and critical acclaim.

Exit Stage

Two Masters of Indian theatre died this year — Kavalam Narayana Panicker and Heisnam Kanhailal. From their roots in Malayalam and Manipuri theatre, respectively, they shaped the nature of performances in India by blending folk and contemporary elements. Panicker has performed the plays of Sanskrit playwrights like Kalidasa as well as his own scripts. Kanhailal is best known for eschewing the spoken language in favour of using the body of the actor — his wife Heisnam Sabitri Devi in Draupadi — to communicate expressions and emotions.