Review: Rizwaan
A play set in violence-ridden Kashmir, and you know what to expect. Or do you? Rizwaan is an unusually told story of a boy Rizwaan – literally, keeper of the Gates of Heaven – whose life and family are torn apart by insurgency in Kashmir. Rizwaan might be anybody in the news reports from the valley we read about in the papers every other day. When our lives are untouched by first-hand experiences of horror, we might take their narrations with a sub-conscious sense of detachment. Rizwaan, in a very quiet way, shakes you out of that detachment.
In the mould of Abhishek Majumdar’s earlier work Lucknow ’76, the narrative moves back and forth in time. We know at the outset how it will end and gradually fit in the jigsaw pieces. Smaller segments too don’t reveal themselves linearly. We are taken aback when a girl begins to chatter cheerfully of her father’s death by a bullet shot and it takes a while to understand why.
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Ranga Shankara holds an annual Theatre and Arts Appreciation Course this time of the year. The course includes, among other things, keynote addresses by eminent theatre & art personalities, live demonstrations by artists, interactions about plays – all aimed to develop new ways of "seeing and listening" for lovers of theatre and art.
“A break from Bollywood: make a song and dance about this brave Indian play” – that’s the title of the latest article [
I’ve always believed that stand up comedians need to be performers and actors themselves. They need to know their way around the stage. But there is also a reason why stand up comedy is stand up comedy and theater is theater. A reason why they are separate and are performed separately. And I would imagine that it is because stand up comedy doesn’t require all the assets of an actor, or of the stage for that matter, and so it is performed at a separate space where one just needs to see the performer.
Tales Of Tenali Rama opens with an address to the little girls and boys in the auditorium, asking them to mind the adults accompanying them – thus striking up with their target audience a bond that sustains throughout the show. A trio of narrators – “Guruji” and his two sparring students – steer us through the escapades of Tenali Rama, the court-poet of 16th century Vijayanagara. They add into the mix their own brand of commentary which includes, among other things, breaking into Carnatic-style renditions of nursery rhymes when the mood takes them.
