A tribute to Saadat Manto

He was reputed as one of the best short story tellers of the 20th century, chronicling the events during and after the partition of India in 1947. But Saadat Hassan Manto was also the most controversial writer of that time and was tried six times for obscenity for his Urdu works.

And so now, producer Sunil Bohra and Vipin Sharma, who played Darsheel's father in Taare Zameen Par, are all geared up to pay tribute to Manto. Reportedly, the two are working on a play based on Manto's story Toba Tek Singh.

A source informed that the play, which will be held in a five-star hotel in Mumbai in November, will have Sharma acting and directing the play.

"Sanjay Chouhan is writing the play for Sunil Bohra. The play will be based on Saadat Hasan Manto's story Toba Tek Singh, a powerful satire based on the relationship between India and Pakistan.

Full report here Times of India 

Magical narratives

The four life histories that form the core of this book throw up new information about a world whose contours we have forgotten.

Stages of Life
Indian Theatre Autobiographies
Kathryn Hansen
Permanent Black
 Rs 750; Pp 392
ISBN 81-7824-311-3
Hardback

Around the middle of the 19th century, Indian theatre suddenly went through a violent transformation; until then, plays were staged in the open air with little scenery, audiences did not have to pay for watching the performance, and the narratives presented were mostly from a stock of folk-tales or myths the audience was already familiar with.

This whole system got swept aside in the 1850s when there appeared, in the heart of Bombay, a theatre with a proscenium stage that, with the use of special stage lighting, music, fanciful costumes and a new aggressive style of acting, could purvey a magical world of fantastic narratives wrapped in stunning stage scenery. Theatre became a world capable of breaking down gender, class and caste barriers and immersing the heterogeneous Indian audience into a single dream world.

Full report here Hindu

Nonsense, sensibly

Anuskha Ravishankar on the dynamics of penning a play.

Theatre tests Anushka Ravishankar. Her latest work Coat Tales to be staged in Delhi this month, directed by Australian Pauline Furlong, is no different. Anushka digs deep into the mine of Indian folk tales, picks out stories, shoves away the barricades set by language and stitches them well.

The Chennai-based author of children's books, poet and playwright, tries to tweak theatre techniques with her new work. Of course, the writer known for her penchant for “nonsense” has not abandoned it in “Coat Tales.”

“The play has bits that are nonsensical,” says Anushka in a telephone chat from Chennai.

Even when she sieved out tales she wanted to tell from the “Panchatantra”, Tamil folk tales and the nautanki tradition, she played with them, pecked at the seams and gave them new sheen and twists. “Coat Tales” seamlessly blends five folk tales and Anushka says folk stories with their inherent character posed a few challenges for the playwright. “When you learn in the Aristotelian structure of plays with exposition, climax and denouement, suddenly you realise it doesn't work with folk tales as they are basically quest tales and often do not have a conflict,” she says.

Full report here Hindu

Imaad's new love

Imaad Shah was recently in town to perform in Motley Crew’s Manto Ismat Hazir Hain. Just off his flight from Mumbai, the young actor took some time off to talk about the play and his new found love for Hind literature.

In the highly appreciated play, Imaad had donned the role of a fundamentalist who accuses the play of being obscene. Talking about it he says “The play has every actor doubling up to play about 5 to 6 characters. So, the role I am doing is very small.”

The fun in theatre
Someone who is barely in his early twenties, Imaad is among the few youngsters who seems to be more keyed up about theatre than films. So, what is fun about theatre that keeps him going? “It is definitely the text that one chooses” he says before elaborating, “There are texts that are arbid and then there are the good texts. At Motley, we are in a phase where we are exploring and doing a lot of work from Hindi texts. Texts from pre-partition period when the society was old fashioned and there are a lot of gems that have been written. We are exploring a lot of texts, especially works of Mohan Rakesh, Parsai etc. So, I can say it’s the fun of literature that keeps us going.”

Full text here Bangalore Mirror