Tendulkar is back, medium is 'Massage'

PUNE: In the ‘70s and the ‘80s when you said Tendulkar, you meant Vijay Tendulkar, the exciting playwright, not Sachin Tendulkar, the explosive batsman.
From Ghashiram Kotwal to Sakharam Binder and from Baby to Kamala, every time Tendulkar wrote a play, the theatre world sat up and took notice.
And then he disappeared. Metaphorically speaking, that is.But after a self-imposed sanyas of almost 15 years, the erstwhile angry young man of Marathi theatre is back, doing what he’s best at—writing plays.
And for a change, the man with the indisputable power to shock and provoke has chosen to write in a deceptively chatty vein.
Though the new play is titled Massage, ‘Confessions of a moviedom struggler-turnedmasseur’ would have been more apt. Nikhil Ratnaparkhi, the citybased Samanvay theatre group’s roly-poly comedian, plays Madhu Joshi, the struggler-masseur.
Joshi relates his bumpy ride starting as a starry-eyed youth in film world, marked by disillusionment, shock, scandal and, sometimes, good luck.
Different it may be, but the old Tendulkar bite is there—though sometimes he rubs in the vitriol so delicately that one almost doesn’t feel the sting.
Ratnaparkhi has his task cut out. For the uninitiated, it’s a solo act, tough call for any actor. And second, it’s neither a farce nor a comedy but a two-hour long first-person account with very little theatrics.
This makes it more suitable for experimental theatre, rather than gala proscenium halls. Luckily, the first-person storytelling format is catching on in the play circuit, even if only for reasons of space and budget constraints.
“Among the first things Nikhil has had to do is shed weight, for the sheer effort of lasting two hours per show,’’ reveals director Sandesh Kulkarni.
“Poor chap, in the process he has been subsisting on salads for the last two months.’’
Interestingly, Samanvay made its debut about 10 years ago with Kovalee Unhe, Sandesh’s adaptation of Tendulkar’s newspaper column of the same name.
Ratnaparkhi played the mute middle-class protagonist in the hit play. Maybe that’s the reason the venerated playwright has entrusted his baby to Samanvay once again.