One dimly lit, grossly under-occupied theatre looks on in funereal silence as the dejected performers put up a dejected show in front of a dejected audience. Or whatever it is you prefer calling the friends, relatives, friends of relatives and relatives of friends of the performers on stage. The distraught, disillusioned director of the play keeps moving amid the sidelines like a purposeless wraith, vacillating between extreme disappointment and murderous rage at the lack of response to his labour of love.
After two hours of eternity, the play finally ends.
The seemingly ceaseless crackling of the packets of chips, which had injected their crispy undertones in every single pregnant pause, comes to a sudden, merciful end. The applause, which in the director’s mind should have roared across the hall like distant claps of thunder, now sounds more like the morbid lull in the middle of a drought. The lights come on, the director’s name is called, and as he makes his way to the stage, red with shame and quivering with embarrassment, he mutters to himself, “There is no goddamned hope for English theatre in this city”.
“There is no goddamned hope for English theatre in this city”, blurted an enthused Siddhant Lahiri, a month after having witnessed the former debacle, “which is why we have to do it”. The deathly silence which enveloped the room at that moment would have crushed a lesser mortal, but not Siddhant. He happily continued propounding on his grand plans to stage an English play in the heart of the city while happily interspersing talk of ‘need gaps’ and ‘cultural revolutions’ with slices of pepperoni laid out on a table before him. Nivedita Sarkar, Janaki Oza, Kashni Sharma, Pranshu Jadon and Gaurav Banerjee simply looked on in various stages of amusement and bemusement, their emotions swaying from wild disbelief to hopeful bliss all through the course of Siddhant’s pepperoni laced soliloquy.
An hour later, these five would be identified as the accomplices of Mr. Lahiri in a madcap venture called Curtain Call.
When Mohan Rakesh wrote his play “Aadhe Adhoore” in 1959, never would he have imagined that
a) It would end up being translated into English under the title of “Halfway House”
b) This translation would land up as course material for students of English at Delhi University
c) A certain Siddhant Lahiri would chance across this play while leafing through his sister’s course material, and decide to perform the English version in a place where Hindi and Gujarati plays are the norm.
However, even 42 years after the play was originally written, the core theme of the play still remains as contemporary and as haunting as ever, which is probably why its effectiveness is not bound by the limitations of language. The play is a merciless look at the sense of incompleteness at the individual level which gets heightened by the sense of frustration due to the pressures of everyday life. And when a happy go lucky theatre group with an average age of 24 chooses a play like this for their debut performance, you know that they’re either insane or attempting to make a difference. Or maybe it’s a dose of both: a belief in the necessity of the former in order for the realization of the latter.
23rd April, Natrani Theatre, Ahmedabad, is where it all begins. So, are you willing to be a part of this madness?
