Double bill

The group���s children���s play Jungledhoom.com is still running, and Ekjute���s Nadira Zaheer Babbar is getting two new productions ready to open at the end of this month.
Footnotes of Life, written by her, from her own observations of the world around her, is a series of four vignettes from life. ���Sometimes when you look into the window of somebody���s house, just a glimpse of what you see gives you an idea of those living there,��� she explains.���So, sometimes, just 15 minutes are enough to understand somebody���s life. So instead of a two-hour play, there are four 15-20 minute episodes, that are complete in themselves.��� The cast includes Utkarsh Majumdar, Vibha Chhibber, Juhi Babbar, Aalekh Dahiya, Ghafeer Husain, Bharat Jha, Arya Babbar and others.
The second play, written by her sister Noor Zaheer is called Hum Kahein Aap Suney, and is inspired by the traditional story-telling form of Dastangoi. Nadira Babbar acts in it, as a Dastangoi expert Shaista Begum, who has retired to a remote Rajasthan village, and just takes on an occasional student. A young Dastango (Bharat Jha) from a family of story-tellers is forcibly sent to her to learn the art.
���It is a dying art,��� she says, ���and the young man says that you can���t make money from it; today a chef earns more than an artiste... and then what happens to change his mind.��� Three stories are woven into the story of the reluctant student, his mentor Ganpat Rai and the teacher. ���One of them,��� she reveals, ���is about Sherezade, whose 1001 stories make up The Arabian Nights ��� but what happened to her? That is very interesting.���
The director has lured back to the stage filmmaker and actor Anant Mahadeven to play Ganpat Rai. Mahadevan started his career as a stage actor, but his appearances had tapered off in the last few years. ���Dastangoi is a tough form and I have never tried it before, so I am excited about this play. It���s also my 30th year in theatre,��� says Mahadevan, ���and I could not have found a better way to celebrate.���
Nadira Babbar is planning two more plays over the coming months ��� one of them starring Ashish Vidyarthi (who starred in her Dayashankar Ki Diary), making this a very busy and active year for Ekjute.
A group of Pune 20-somethings have formed a new theatre group called Naatak Company, and staged their first full-fledged production Sutti Butti in Mumbai last week. Adapted from a Russian story by Nipun Dharmadhikari, who also directs, the play is a wonderfully energetic fable of what happens when all parents disappear one day. At first the kids enjoy the freedom and the unlimited ice-cream but soon realise that a life without grownups is very inconvenient and not all that exciting.
Dharmadhikari and some of the actors in Sutti Butti had swept the Thespo Awards last year for Dalan, and you can see all that energy and talent in the new play too. The actors, playing kids, are terrific and the use of animated projection instead of sets worked very well for kids in the audience, but you suspect parents enjoyed it even more.