All for the love of Premchand

Every week for the past five years, city playwright Mujeeb Khan has sat down religiously with a Munshi Premchand story, and adapted it into a play. Actors at his Ideal Drama and Entertainment Academy (IDEA) spend five days rehearsing the play, stage it on a Friday, and by Saturday, they move on to the next play in the series.

Khan takes a break from this weekly cycle just once a year, to organise a Premchand theatre festival involving a series of plays around the Hindi author’s birthday on July 31.

This year’s Prem Utsav is a 10-day celebration from August 1 to 10 at Vile Parle’s Sathaye College auditorium, where IDEA has staged all its Premchand plays for free.

The festival will include 53 plays, most of them written in the last year and some popular favourites such as Eid Gaha and Gareeb ki Haaye.

“I see myself as an archaeological department in theatre, responsible for preserving the literature of fading greats,” said Khan (50), who describes Premchand as the most original and pious of Hindi writers. He has already adapted 238 of Premchand’s 283 stories, and hopes to complete the entire collection before next year’s festival.

Full report here Hindustan Times

The poet as a rebel

When playwright Shahid Anwar read out the script of Sara to me, I felt compelled to direct it. I must confess my Urdu is not that hot so it took me a while to understand and appreciate the late Sara Shagufta’s poetry. What first struck me was the remarkable life that she led and the challenges she faced as a woman and a poet in a stiflingly male-dominated society of Pakistan in the 1970s. To quote a male poet of her time and place: “A woman with a pen is a nuisance to society.”

Lest we think we are better off in India or in the 21st century, a friend of mine recalls with some amusement that whenever she travels by taxi and instructs the driver to take her on a particular route, he invariably tells her it’s not a good idea and suggests an alternative route. Once when I took a taxi with her, she asked me to give directions. Not a word out of the driver. She paid the fare, but the change was handed over to me.

Why do we think that women do not have a right to use their brains or to express themselves freely?
Sara, the play, is a dramatic enactment of the life and times of one of Pakistan’s most controversial poets whose life was troubled with personal conflict. Largely based on her letters to Amrita Pritam, this dramatisation takes us through her struggles and victories as it does try to fathom her innermost yearnings. Her poetry is searing and deeply personal. It dazzles with metaphor and compels the reader to try and understand her life better through her words. One gem in translation—Does a woman have any territory beyond her body?  

Full article here Week

Class struggle

Mariam Karim's The Betrayal of Selvamary is about the hypocrisy of the well-heeled... 

Mariam Karim, writer of The Betrayal of Selvamary — her maiden effort as a playwright — is an interesting mixture of the conservative and the liberal. While her play exposes the class, caste and communal mindset of the well-heeled with a ruthless confidence, her own reluctance to venture into the city on her own or rearrange domestic commitments are distinctly, if sweetly, suggestive of upper middle class correctness. 

The Betrayal... rips off the mask of benevolence many an honourable citizen would be found wearing. It also presents us with a set of people of the type we are used to seeing in urban environments across India: an architect, a corporate head, a well-educated mother of two, an ex-model, a poet, and so on. Mariam admits her characters are ‘regular' kinds of people caught in an extraordinary situation. 

But as to whether she showed the play to her friends and whether anyone caught a reflection in the mirror, she answers with a simple, “Oh yes, they've all liked it very much.” But then, Mariam is used to being taken seriously. Her first novel, My Little Boat, published by Penguin, was nominated for the Dublin International IMPAC Award and the Hutch Crossword Award. Her second, The Bereavement of Agnes Desmoulins, was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2009 even before publication.

Full report here The Hindu

And then there were five...

Five plays have been shortlisted for The Hindu MetroPlus Playwright Award 2010, which carries a prize of Rs. 1 lakh for the best unpublished and unperformed script. We received 80 valid entries from all over the country.

The panel of judges long-listed 10 plays, of which these five made the shortlist. Here is a snapshot of the five playwrights and their submissions. Detailed interviews with each of the five will be carried in MetroPlus over the next few days.

The winner will be announced before the end of the month.

“An Arrangement of Shoes” by Abhishek Majumdar
“Limbo” by Manjima Chatterjee
“Taramandal” by Neel Chaudhuri
“The Betrayal of Selvamary” by Mariam Karim
“Yellow Orange Sunshine” by Mohit Takalkar

Full report here Hindu