The iconic Prithvi Theatre from Mumbai is going global. From today, it brings its annual theatre festival to the UAE as Prithvi@Dubai, which will see a range of acclaimed plays being performed — some returning and some for the first time.
“We’ve taken our festivals to other cities in India — Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Bengaluru. Dubai, we knew, is a place where we will be supported by a large Indian population,” Kunal Kapoor, trustee at Prithvi Theatre told tabloid!.
“This was something we thought of at length. We’ve had theatre companies from India [going abroad] — my mother’s parents have taken theatre everywhere... from Kabul to Australia, and [did] Shakespeare and Shaw in the 1960s. Indian theatre has been to Dubai, to Singapore, to Muscat... but those were one-off shows. Holding a festival needs a lot of economic consideration because it’s not like taking one play for one or two performances over the weekend”.
Kapoor is the grandson of Prithviraj Kapoor, a pioneer of Indian theatre and films. His late mother, Jennifer Kendal, and father Shashi Kapoor were both actors.
Personal selection
The five-day event at Ductac, Mall of the Emirates, has been carefully selected by Kapoor and is extremely close to Prithvi Theatre, he said.
“I made a short list of the plays for the festival. Then we weighed each one’s pros and cons, the cost each may involve, the fees — because we believe that if it’s professional theatre the groups must be paid,” Kapoor said.
“Naseer was in the very first play held at Prithvi Theatre. He’s doing Dear Liar, which was the last play my mother’s parents, Geoffrey Kendal and Laura Liddell, toured India with. In fact, Naseer wears the same jacket my grandfather wore in that play. It’s very special to have Naseer and Ratna on board. Ratna has been performing since the 1970s at Prithvi,” Kapoor said.
Tomorrow, Bollywood actress Sonali Kulkarni will take the stage with White Lily and Knight Rider, a play which explores continually changing male-female relationships in the digital world.
“White Lily and Knight Rider is a Marathi play translated in Hindi. It’s a product which has essentially come out of Prithvi. It’s a great piece of writing... Sonali has also been performing at Prithvi since the beginning of her career as an actress. Then you have Nothing Like Lear, which is Shakespeare.
“With the Glass Menagerie, we bring a hard-core classic. Shernaz [Patel, the lead actress] was a volunteer at the very first festival at Prithvi in 1983, a young college girl. Then she was part of the 1985 festival, which I put together. Then we have Shabana who grew up in Prithvi Theatre. She was a child when Prithvi Theatre was being built. Her mother Shaukat Azmi was part of Prithvi Theatre in the 1950s”. On May 2, Azmi and her husband, writer and lyricist Javed Akhtar, will present readings from Azmi’s mother Shaukat Azmi’s memoirs of her poet husband Kaifi Azmi. The show will be insterspersed with poems and ghazals written by Kaifi.
“You have Kaifi Azmi’s writing and Urdu, the language — which is very important to us. So, we have English, Urdu, Hindustani and a modern English-Hindi plays — so it all came together,” said Kapoor. “Yes, there’s a lot of connections. It’s all very close to Prithvi in so many ways”.
Tickets start at Dh100. Call 04-3414777 or write to box.office@ductac.org. Audience can also meet the artists each day during the Stage Talks series.
EDITOR’S PICKS
If you can’t make it to all five days of the Prithvi@Dubai festival, we suggest you do not miss these:
Dear Liar
When: Wednesday, April 27
Cast: Naseeruddin Shah and Ratna Pathak Shah
Director: Satyadev Dubey
“Dear Liar in fact is what helped us [become] really close to Prithvi. There was a little bit of a tension at one point between Motley [theatre company founded by Naseeruddin Shah] and Prithvi, which got quickly resolved when Dear Liar was done. Also it has been Dubey ji’s parting gift to us. So Dear Liar has been a boon to all of us… The kind of observations Shaw makes of war, the perils of industrialisation… and of course the timeless relationship that exists between two brilliant people, I don’t know if I can claim that the play has any immediate relevance to [an] Indian context but as a historical document it’s about Shaw’s work and Stella Campbell, who no one knows about though she figured very, very importantly in Shaw’s life.” — Naseeruddin Shah
“[Campbell] is one of the most wonderfully written parts in theatre. It’s talking about an actress, it talks of a most interesting relationship between two extremely intelligent people, both great eccentrics and egocentrics also. Yes, they are British writers and characters but I found it very, very easy to identify with these two because I see people like this all around me in theatre or in films. It has stretched me beyond my capacities and I’ve definitely grown a great deal with the shows. I’ve learnt a lot about myself and about performing… George Bernard Shaw and Mrs Campbell saw the end of an era. The Victorian Era passed, the World Wars began and created all the horror that they did create. They both lost friends and family in the wars. That’s what’s going on around us today. There may not be world wars but we are constantly dealing with other terrible things that are happening around us in society. And the fact that actors, too, are affected with all these. I think all these points make it all come alive for me.” — Ratna Pathak Shah
Nothing Like Lear
When: Friday, April 29
Cast: Vinay Pathak
Director: Rajat Kapur
“Nothing Like Lear is based on Shakespeare’s King Lear but as the name says, it’s nothing like the Shakespearean play. The way I work with Shakespeare’s plays is to take the essence of it and find our own context within that. We looked at the text very deeply and tried to find out what were the clues of the play — such as old age, betrayal, relationship between parents and children, blindness, loss of power and then we started improvising around those themes. Out of it all emerged our play Nothing Like Lear. It’s very contemporary, yet it’s Shakespeare.” — Rajat Kapur
“[The play sees a clown] who does an interpretation of a rendition of King Lear. This clown represents the common man. There’s jealousy, madness, violence between siblings and we tried to incorporate everything in the way we tried to tell the story. The challenge is also in the fact that every time I go up on stage, there’s no one else but me there. So if I forget the lines there’s no one there to prompt me. But the bigger challenge is to make sense of it all and to connect whoever is watching me or listening to me.” — Vinay Pathak
Kaifi Aur Main
When: Sunday, May 1
Cast: Shabana Azmi and Javed Akhtar
Director: Ramesh Talwar
“Although Kaifi Aur Main is the personal story of two extraordinary artists, it’s also universal in its appeal. It has romance, drama, live music, poetry and humour as well as a deeply inspirational story of a man who rose above his personal illness that left his left arm and leg incapacitated for life and dedicated himself to the upliftment of the tiny village Mijwan in which he was born. I think it’s perhaps the only example of a daughter and son-in-law paying a tribute to their family in this special way. For me, Kaifi Aur Main is a gift that I feel fortunate to share with the audience. Also nobody else could have written or acted in it other than Javed Akhtar because he is completely in sync with the world they inhabited. The issues of social justice, gender equality, freedom will always remain relevant. Plus the play draws you into an era where romance meant writing a letter to your beloved in your own blood.” — Shabana Azmi
