Buzz From The Prithvi Threatre Festival

Since last weekend Prithvi Theatre, Prithvi house and its café have been abuzz with festival activities. Naseeruddin Shah's festival opening premier Riding Madly Off in all Directions, did perhaps set the tone for the festival. Lots of crowd, a lot of it very filmy, experimentation with the form and constant nudging to humour and "drama of humour" —  a theme that recurred for the next 12 days.

Amidst the demonetisation move and the following chaos, which impacted the ticket sales and audience numbers somewhat, I managed to catch three plays and a music recital. The stage talk by Alyque Padamsee was cancelled and I ended up watching an hour of the movie Julius Caesar. However, after watching the scene with "Et Tu, Brutus" and constantly thinking of the fast-disappearing Kheema Pao from the café, I decided to spend the rest of the evening queuing up for yummy tawa stuff prepared and served by ever-smiling Bengali cooks. 

Some people rued the fact that Prithvi did not have an international group except for Sunday's acoustic jam by a French group Artie's. However, local groups such as Motley, Ekjute, Ansh, Yatri are no less talented and they premiered with plays ranging between deeply engaging, experimental, interesting and enjoyable. However, that brings me to my eternal dilemma of standing ovation. While some plays deserve it, often plays are good but not necessarily exceptional. One feels compelled to stand up to salute the efforts of the actors and musicians and technicians but doesn't that take away from those who have truly been class apart? For example Chuhal, a play written, directed [and also the lead actor] by Manav Kaul, started well. Towards the end it seemed to have lost direction and the message, at best, was jumbled. Yet, we all stood up, perhaps giving a wrong signal that the play had indeed worked. Should we be more stingy in our appreciation? To stand or not, that is the question in the auditorium. 

There is one thing that I am absolutely sure about and in fact pretty enraged about. I really really want to know what earth-shattering work some members of the audience achieve by messaging during the 30-second black outs in a 75-minute long play. Really? Something that could not wait for one hour and 15 minutes but could be done on WhatsApp? Beats me! At Tejashree Amonkar's recital Shashi Vyas had to request the audience to not keep mobiles on vibration mode as that too disturbs the vocalist. Only if we could believe it no? What's a little grrr grrr from pockets and purse.

Then what rattled me a little was the selfie phenomenon in the very very crowded café and even the queue for the plays. Prithvi is known for on dot punctuality and I absolutely love that about them. Audience, including celebrities – and there were many on all the days — senior citizens and the rest, queue up at least 45 minutes before the show time and are ushered in 15 minutes prior to the start of the performance. Normally this goes very smoothly but when it is festival time and there are many enthusiastic newcomers/first timers, dressed to kill [some with high heels and one with a leather jacket too!]. New and young crowd is great news for theatre in general but many of them also choose to click the perfect profile picture/selfie anywhere and everywhere. My aging brain, tired from queuing up for exchanging four thousand rupees that afternoon, was beginning to burst in flames at the perfect pouts. But that's probably because I am not keeping up with times. 

All that's outside. Once you are inside the thrust theatre, it goes cold and dark and quiet. And then when you relish Shakespeare's King Lear in Marathi, written by maverick Makrand Deshpande, you are transported to a world of poetry, pathos and glimpses of nothing but genius. His first Marathi play had many witty and beautiful verses capturing the Shakespearean tragedy. 

A very poor translation of one of them goes like this:

We have four types of laughter 
One that smiles shyly in the cheeks 
Second one that grins ear to ear, showing all the teeth, 
Third which guffaws as you hold your stomach and 
Fourth which makes roll on the floor… 
First is what a bud of frangipani does, 
Second you see in a sunflower, 
Third is a creeper and also my mother, 
Fourth is my idiotic father… 
Birth smiles shyly, Childhood smiles ear to ear… 
Youth guffaws but the one that rolls on the floor, 
Laughing hard, 
Is old age… 

There were many performances that I missed but after this there wasn't much I longed to see. And there were other promises aka deadlines to keep. Early morning on Sunday at 7.30 am Tejashree Amonkar, granddaughter of Kishoritai Amonkar, sang for the first time without microphones. Though more performances were lined up for that day and the next, as she sang for over an hour ending with Mharo Pranam Meerabai's bhajan composed by Kishoritai, the festival drew a close for me.