Ramanjit Kaur’s latest play inspired from Mahabharata

Internationally-awarded theatre and film actor-director, Ramanjit Kaur, is all geared up to stage her latest play, The Dice of Desire, which is inspired by

Mahabharata

. It will be staged on December 4 and December 5 at the ICCR. Directed by Ramanjit Kaur and Vansh Bhardwaj, the play has music by Pandit

Tanmoy Bose

and dialogues in

Hindi

by MK Singh. It will be staged in three languages — English, Hindi and Bengali. “The play has been inspired by the works of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Manish Singh Bhaduria, Narendra Kohli, Kavita Kane, Rabindranath Tagore, Anand Neelkanthan, Aditi Banerjee and others. The piece is a deconstructed text where each character represents community and hence is played by many actors. Krishna too appears with his alter ego,” said Ramanjit.

The play mainly focusses on the various

human desires

and the myriad conflicts that arise from them. The play gets its inspiration from the Mahabharata and delves into the world of desires through its different women characters, Krishna and others. It explores how the intensity of desires drives us and our destiny. It also wonders where they take us — do they take us towards misery and destruction or happiness and peace. “In 2011, when I started doing gender-fluid performances, which dealt with short stories, oral stories, poems, news reports and research work, it was a bit ahead of its time. I got a lot of backlash from men in society, also my male friends. They only saw male bashing in them. Some of my close male friends don’t come to see my plays anymore,” Ramanjit had told us earlier about her team that’s an all-women theatre group.