Report: Prithvi Theatre Festival 2024
With dastangoi performances, plays based on poems and short stories and musical interludes, the 39th edition of the annual festival had much to offer
When actors Shashi Kapoor and Jennifer Kendal Kapoor built Prithvi Theatre in the 1970s, they may not have imagined that their labour of love housed in Juhu, Mumbai, would continue to be a cultural hotspot well beyond their lifetimes. The performance venue, with a welcoming vibe, is now looked after by their son Kunal Kapoor and grandson Zahan Kapoor.
While it is packed with programming throughout the year, the winter months are particularly special because the birthday of actor Prithviraj Kapoor (Shashi’s father) falls on November 3. He ran a reputed travelling theatre company called Prithvi Theatres between 1944 and 1960.
The history of the place came alive on stage at the 39th edition of the annual Prithvi Theatre Festival that ran from November 3 to 18 this year. One of the performances, Dastaan-e-Ahwaal-e-Kapoor, was based on the illustrious Kapoor family itself. Sibtain Shahidi, who wrote it, said, “Adapting the silent era of movies and of Parsi theatre as well as the lineage of Prithviraj and Raj Kapoor into the dastangoi form was both inspiring and challenging.”
It took him eight months to complete the script. The research process involved reading books like Madhu Jain’s The Kapoors: The First Family of Indian Cinema (2009), Ritu Nanda’s Raj Kapoor: The One and Only Showman (2017), and Rahul Rawail and Pranika Sharma’s Raj Kapoor: The Master at Work (2021), apart from watching films, going through archives, and getting a more intimate picture of the family through conversations with Kunal Kapoor.
Shahidi added, “Most of Prithviraj Kapoor and Raj Kapoor’s friends and mentors were aligned with communist ideologies. For both father and son, their plays and films served as a form of revolution and, for Raj Kapoor, his film songs were his slogans.” The dastaan was directed by Mahmood Farooqui, and performed by Rana Pratap Senger and Rajesh Kumar.
The dastangoi form of Urdu storytelling was also skilfully explored by Ashok Lal, who wrote Dastaan-e-Ashok-o-Akbar performed by Ratna Pathak Shah and Dastaan-e-Bhanwari performed by Naseeruddin Shah. The first one was a fictional narrative about an interfaith friendship between a Muslim man from Banaras and a Hindu man from Aligarh who refuse to let their love for each other be transformed into hatred by bloodthirsty mobs. It was interspersed with Lal’s own poetry in Urdu, and verses from Kaifi Azmi and Nida Fazli.
The second one was based on social worker Bhanwari Devi’s life. She was gangraped for her advocacy against child marriage in Rajasthan but did not let that deter her from a lifelong commitment to justice that led to a Supreme Court verdict laying down the Vishaka guidelines to be followed while dealing with complaints about sexual harassment at work.
Lal met activists, lawyers and medical professionals before he wrote the dastaan. Kavita Srivastava, National President of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, was a tremendous source of support while he was conducting research. Lal said, “Kavita has worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Bhanwari all along during the latter’s crusade. She arranged a meeting with Bhanwari in her village Bhateri. It was like a pilgrimage for me.” Apart from sharing her story with him, Bhanwari Devi was also present during shows performed in Jaipur and Ajmer.
While Dastaan-e-Bhanwari sought to express, in Lal’s own words, “disgust, shame, horror and anger against patriarchy”, playwright-director Faezeh Jalali’s play Runaway Brides engaged with the subject of inter-religious conflict through rib-tickling comedy that delighted in excess and exaggeration. Performed by an ensemble cast, it was woven around the wedding ceremony of a Hindu man and a Muslim woman who are shocked to discover that their mothers are missing just before the pandit begins reciting the mantras. A search party goes out to bring them back. Little do they know that the bride’s mother and the groom’s mother are lesbian lovers who have chosen to elope on the day their children want to get married.
Jalali said, “My intention is always for us to be able to laugh at ourselves, not preach to audiences. Each person takes away what they understand. It can seem like a masala comedy to some, others will perhaps get the layers. Who knows?” While the love unfolding between Anju Shetty (played by Reshma Shetty) and Razia Amin (played by Nimisha Sirohi) seemed more a sub-plot rather the main story, it was appreciated by audiences for its whacky treatment. “I use stereotypes to break stereotypes, if that makes sense. I love farce. It is an amazing genre that can hold up a mirror to society without pointing fingers,” Jalali added.
Another play that had audiences whistling and hooting was writer-director Manav Kaul’s Pyaar Aadmi Ko Kabootar Bana Deta Hai, based on his short story Prem Kabootar. While writing the play, he wanted to show “what love looked like in the pre-Instagram, pre-WhatsApp era when people wrote love letters to each other”. Kaul said, “I find myself attracted to that world of innocence because I grew up in a small town where talking to a girl was considered an achievement for a boy, and getting a love letter was the absolute pinnacle.”
The musical dug into the emotional drama that ensues when a close-knit group of three boys falls into disarray with two of them pining for the affection of the same girl. To spice things up even further, one of them was a fiction writer whose inner world was explored with the help of three witches modelled after the ones in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Two other plays stood out from the festival’s vast number of offerings this year — It’s a Wonderful Life and Khichik. The former, a stage version of Frank Capra’s classic Christmas movie, was based on Mary Elliott Nelson’s script. Directed by Akarsh Khurana, and performed by a huge cast of talented actors, it had all the feel-good elements associated with a Christmas tale — kindness, divine intervention, gentle humour, and hope against all odds.
Khichik, directed by Divya Jagdale, took audiences through the ups and downs of a relationship forged in college, sealed by marriage, disrupted by infidelity, and revived through friendship. It was a Hindi translation of the play Snapshots from an Album written and directed by her late husband Shiv Subrahmanyam, peppered with Bollywood songs.
The Gypsies, written by Prairna Agarwal and directed by Navin Agarwal, was promising because it dealt with how urban people sometimes end up romanticising indigenous and nomadic communities without really understanding their culture on its own terms. Based on Alexander Pushkin’s poem Gypsies, it brought up questions around monogamy, the nature of love, the tendency to grow possessive, and the desire to be free. While the play was conceptually interesting, it relied heavily on telling rather than showing.
This year, the festival presented the work of many playwrights including Annie Zaidi, Satchit Puranik, Lovely Raj, Gagan Dev Riar, Ravi Kant Nirala, Veenapani Chawla, Makarand Deshpande, Augusta Wilson, and Mahmood Farooqui. Those who wanted to learn more about the craft and history of theatre-making in modern India had a blast listening to “stage talks” hosted by Pragya Tiwari with veteran theatrewallahs. Naseeruddin Shah spoke about his association with Om Puri, while Nimmy Raphel and Vinay Kumar spoke about Veenapani Chawla. Sunil Shanbag and Shernaz Patel talked about their own work.
As usual, Prithvi Theatre collaborated with the music store Furtados to give a platform to talented young indie musicians who entertained audiences before and between plays. The line-up included Sanket Pradhan, Ishan Nagar, D-Shaw, Kunal Chaudhry, The Other Brothers, Darshan Dasari, Omkar Samir Kanitkar, Keya Khedekar, Vipul Panchal, Bhavesh Dalbanjan, Geet Manocha, Shrikanth Nair and the band Sochh. The curation showcased a mix of diverse genres such as pop, rock, jazz, folk, Hindustani and Western classical music.
Hopefully, the next edition will continue to uphold Prithvi’s legacy of being at the cutting edge of theatre and promote younger playwrights, bolder subjects and even more experimental formats.
Chintan Girish Modi writes about books, art and culture. He can be reached @chintanwriting on Instagram and X.
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