Getting high on theatre

It seems somehow apt for a group called Spontaneous Assembly to seek alternative performance spaces. The Tea Centre was packed for the reading of Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes by Denzil Smith and Avantika Akerkar, directed by Zubin Driver. The next performance of Driver’s Stump and Manto’s Toba Tek Singh will be outside Churchgate station. Stump has a man in a gunny sack with just his head sticking out. The inspiration for the play came from a true incident about a man being sent to a lunatic asylum, simply because he stood still on the street for hours. “His standing still,� says Zubin, “was agitating everybody else around him, because such behaviour is not a part of urban culture.� Toba Tek Singh, is of course a well known Manto story about a man in a lunatic asylum who is bewildered by the idea of Partition—it will be Zubin’s first Hindi play. The first piece will be performed by Nikhil Rao, and the second by Mohit Sharma. Zubin says he is moving towards “cerebral work which is accessible to everybody. Like Toba Tek Singh can be understood by an intellectual as well as a paanwala.� Next, he plans to do David Mamet’s A Life in the Theatre, about an old actor who is fading and a young actor on his way up; and Ronald Harwood''s The Dresser about an actor and his dresser. “I want to do King Lear, and The Dresser is a step towards it—it will prepare me for Lear.� Why Lear? “It is Shakespeare’s deepest, darkest plays and it us universal. Also it has never been done on English here. I would do a modern version with minimal sets, but with the original text.� Meanwhile, Zubin says, he is meeting and interacting with like-minded people, exchanging ideas. “There is a renewed interest in theatre,� he says, “so many people—students, artists, journalists—come up and say they want to participate in readings. There is buzz now, like there used to be a decade ago.� ****** Salim Arif’s production of Kharaashein, based on Gulzar’s writings on the riots went down very well with audiences. A visibly moved Gulzar said, that after watching the performance, he felt his words rang true. Arif had got together actors like Atul Kulkarni, Kishore Kadam, Ganesh Yadav, Anoop Soni, Vaishali Thakkar for the enactments of three hard-hitting stories, of which Atul Kulkarni’s Khauf, in which a man in a train is so frightened of being attacked by a fellow passenger in the train, that he ends up killing him, gave one goose bumps. However, what is heartening about audience reaction to Kharaashein is that people are willing to watch offbeat work, and a talented director like Arif is not hamstrung by commercial constraints.