Often films and shows prefer an adult audience, but at Kaaga Tales Weekends, grown-ups were stopped from entering Ranga Shankara. The theatre venue is promoting productions targetted at children through its endeavour Maruti Puppet Theatre.
And even if the adults persisted, they would have had to crouch inside a Maruti car to watch a puppet show unfold on the boot of the car.
Padmavati Rao’s voiceover introduces us to Keshavbhai’s farm. To the roosters, chickens and sheep on it; the well with water being drawn from it; a long shot of the owner going home in his bullock cart.
Revolving around the theme of our obsession with physical appearances and its impact on one’s social status, the plot has the balding Keshavbhai run from pillar to post, rooster to ram, looking for ‘lotions, potions and solutions’. “He asks the rooster for his feathers to make a cap from them, the sheep for wool for a wig,” says Padmavati.
Sundari, his wife, provides the voice of wisdom: ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re going bald, you are still who you are - generous and kind-hearted - on the whole, a nice person’.
Padmavati, with her theatre experience stretching across five languages - Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada and English - shared with the likes of Girish Karnad, Shankar Nag, Alyque Padamsee, Mahendra Joshi and Mahesh Dattani, handles 10 characters single-handed. “How many times I’ve wished for numerous hands like Ma Durga just so that I can hold a puppet in each,” she jokes, adding that some scenes have her moving as many as four puppets, made of foam, papier mache and old bottles, held together with binding wire and paper tube.
Even as a child, Padmavati hated to throw away things. “My mother would say, ‘Amcha sansar kat kasri cha,’ which means ‘Our households have to be run economically’. So I have her and the Gandhian lifestyle at home to both credit and blame for this. Those sensibilities have stuck on longer than I’d assumed,” she recalls.
Padmavati first started working with junk at age nine. Soon it was no longer just books that she was putting together, but making puppets using old newspapers, socks, rags and ropes.
It was only natural for Padmavati’s Kaaga Tales to recycle props she used for her earlier production ‘’The First Leaf’ that had a 50-show run. “I needed a Maruti car on stage for that play, and I managed to fit half of it,” she says. But once the show was over, and after a chat with Arundhati Nag whose Sanket Trust manages Ranga Shankara, Padmavati came up with the idea of having the car fabricated into a stage.
“In the first scene of Kaaga, I mention that Keshavbhai allowed anyone to draw water from the well, hoping that it will register and be remembered in the years to come. In this age of fast food chains, you have to pay for water too,” says Padmavati, adding that she has given close attention the fabric and textures used in the production. “Sundari wears a blouse of khann, a fabric popular in Maharashtra and northern Karnataka during my childhood years,” she says.
Four more shows of The Kaaga Theatre Weekends have been scheduled on the coming Saturday and Sunday at Ranga Shakara at 10.30 am and 12 pm.