English theatre has always languished in Pune, while Marathi theatre has flourished. This isn’t surprising, considering that the latter is adorned with theatre heavyweights such as Satish Alekar, Mohan Agashe and Jabbar Patel. These are household names that, together with Vijay Tendulkar, Mahesh Elkunchwar, every Maharashtrian is conversant with.
Not that attempts haven’t been made to bring English plays to Pune. A couple of years ago, actor-director Feroze of Hyderabad-based Sifar theatre, an alumnus of the National School of Drama, brought Hindi renderings of two English plays to Pune: Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story and my own The Wisest Fool on Earth, which he enacted as well as directed. But there were fewer than a dozen people in the audience at The Box Studio, where the performances were held. Feroze said that, taking into account all the expenses he incurred in travelling with his unit to Pune, the pathetic sale of tickets didn’t even allow him to break even!
Now, Edward Albee is an iconic American playwright who belongs to the same literary canon as Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. Likewise, The Wisest Fool on Earth has had successful runs at the Prithvi Theatre in Bombay and The Holiday Inn in Pune (where it was directed and performed by Rajit Kapur of RAGE), and at Lamakaan in Hyderabad, directed and enacted by Feroze. So, why then were there so few viewers at The Box?
My friends had a ready explanation. The Box is situated in a conservative neighbourhood, they said. A middle-class audience certainly doesn’t want to ruin their evening by watching plays that deal with suicide, scatology and homosexuality. They also pointed out that Feroze’s work was unknown to audiences in Pune, and he should have done more to publicise and promote the plays.
It is with this at the back of my mind that I went to The Box to watch a performance of the English play, Phoenix, written by Aruna Thosar-Dixit and directed by Mohan Madgulkar. The auditorium was packed to capacity, and this not only impressed me, but it also made me envious.
The producers describe Phoenix as a “long-act” play, with a running time of 80 minutes. It is a crowd-funded theatre production presented by Pradeep Dixit’s Communication, which supports individual social responsibility projects. The cast is made up of Mohan Madgulkar (who also directs the play), Radhika Madgulkar, Angad Patwardhan, Harshwardhan Shrotri, Laxmi Birajdar and Pramiti Narke.
I hadn’t read the work of Aruna Thosar-Dixit or seen any of the actors in the play on stage before, except for Angad Patwardhan, whose dramatised reading of the letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great at the Max Mueller Bhavan I liked. So, when I discovered that Angad was in the play, I decided to go and see it.
No sooner did the play begin than I realised why a full house had come to watch it. It dealt with the familiar theme of marital discord. Two couples, Nilima and Ashok, and Ganesan and Rajalaxmi, are both trapped in mismatched marriages. In the first case, it’s the husband who wants a divorce from his doormat of a wife, especially as he’s having an affair with a savvy chick, Kavita. In the second case, it’s the wife who’s ready to dump her lacklustre husband. It’s almost as if everything might have been okay if only Ashok had married Rajalaxmi, and Ganesan had married Nilima. Ashok and Nilima have kids, so one is left wondering if the play would end up being a custody battle. Mercifully, it doesn’t. Instead, it skillfully inverts the theme of the custody battle.
All the actors played their parts well, though I did feel that (seated as I was in the first row), Mohan Madgulkar, enacting the role of Ashok, was needlessly loud in his delivery, and Ashok’s male chauvinism would come through even if Mohan lowered his decibel level a little. Angad Patwardhan as Ganesan was superb, although his role was relatively minor. Feminists who see the play are unlikely to be amused by Aruna Thosar-Dixit’s trivialisation of feminism. At one stage, the dialogue goes like this:
Ashok: You are a feminist, right?
Rajalaxmi: Yes, I am.
Rajalaxmi also says, “I get a hundred messages from men who want to f… me,” which is about the boldest line in the entire play.
But the actor who took the cake was, undoubtedly, Radhika Madgulkar with her fine histrionics. To bring tears to one’s eyes on stage is certainly no child’s play. In the movies, they use glycerin.
Purists might cringe at some of the pronunciations and grammar of the actors. Early in the play, Nilima pronounces ‘breakfast’ as ‘break-fast’. Mohan says, “You allowed him to got up late (instead of get up late). But this is nitpicking. The Indianised pronunciation and grammar only add to the play’s flavour and authenticity.
Phoenix is definitely worth watching. Its atypical ending, and the fact that it’s an original play written in English, both go in its favour. I wish the play every success. May it run to packed houses wherever it’s staged. And I promise I won’t be envious.
(The writer is a well-known author and former head of the English Department at Savitribai Phule Pune University)
