Ever wondered what would happen if two political parties won exactly the same number of votes? Well, Abhishek Iyengar, writer and director of Namma Metro, P S I Don’t Love You and SMS, was intrigued by the idea, and that’s how he struck on the idea of Magadi Days.
Chatting with City Express after the play’s premiere show at K H Kala Soudha in Hanumanthanagar on Sunday, Abhishek shares that Magadi Days took him close to six months to pen and he was inspired by three characters in the BBC show Yes Minister.
“The minister, his personal secretary and a civil servant - I often wished I’d created them. So when I got a chance to write a play about politics, I drew from the situations they faced in the TV series, their reactions to them and their general outlook,” says Abhishek.
Magadi Days has three corresponding characters. There’s the chief minister Ananth Krishna (Rangaraj Bhatracharya), a techie who decides to take a plunge into politics to bring about reforms using technology; chief secretary of state Mahadeva, brought to life by Anirudh Mahesh, who with his cunning ways tries to achieve his personal agenda; and the personal secretary Vinod, enacted by Ranjan, who is ‘like a see-saw’, caught between the will of the two more powerful men.
The satire mirrors Abhishek’s beliefs about politics - that those in power should have better vision and control over the bureaucratic rungs of governance during their mere five-year terms in comparison to the personal secretaries and other appointed staff, whose tenure may last up to 30 to 40 years, and who therefore, in reality, ‘run the government’.
But it’s characters Ibu and Lakavva who charm the audience. Both slum dwellers, they suddenly find themselves all powerful when it is their vote alone that can swing the election result in favour of either one of the political parties.
“My favourite part of the play, which the audience also immensely enjoyed is when Lakavva goes to visit the CM and has to bribe police personnel at each of the four tiers of security. Later, after he wins the election, the CM visits Lakavva and has to pass through four barriers of poverty, helplessness, disease and desire,” says Abhishek.
On the title, the playwright-director says that Magadi, a town beyond Ramanagara district, was the first town that popped into his head as he began to write. A fan of R K Narayan’s works, Abhishek could not help but be struck by the similarity between the setting of his play and the fictional town of Malgudi, the backdrop of many of the legendary author’s novels. “I thought why not pay tribute to my favourite writer through the title,” says Abhishek, who is also founder of the seven-year old troupe WeMove Theatre that produced Magadi Days.
For Abhishek, who comes from a family of writers and theatre artistes, theatre is in his blood. Following the audience’s verdict that Magadi Days is WeMove’s best play so far, he hopes that it will take a step ahead for regional theatre.
“We have finally done away with the perception that Kannada theatre is a non-intellectual endeavour and often aligns with the Mahabharata than modern times,” he says.
The troupe is now planning to travel with Magadi Days to Chennai and Mumbai.