Anand Chonat and Steven Soderberg have one thing in common: Che Guevara.
Anand, a Chennai-based actor-director, is directing a Tamil play called Che Guevara which will be staged in his city next month. Just ahead of that, American filmmaker Soderberg’s Guerrilla, a two-part movie, also based on the Argentinean revolutionary, is getting ready for release this month.
The difference is that Soderberg has travelled to South American countries quite a few times to collect details for his movie, while Anand hasn’t even made a single trip to any of those Latin-speaking nations. Even so, he is confident that he can bring the real Che before his audience.
“I have seen movies and documentaries on Che Guevara. I have also read a number of books about him. It is really challenging to do the role of a revolutionary whom I have never seen. To immortalise the character, I’ve given thrust to the gestures and expressions that he is known for,” says Anand, who plays Che.
Anand then shows me how Che smoked cigars. He suddenly strikes a pose, a popular one of the revolutionary.
“My idea is to present before the audience the relevance of revolution in the present set-up. I am impressed by the lifestyle of Che, who lived for the depressed and marginalised. His life was full of struggles,” he says.
Anand is also the founder of Indian School of Drama, a troupe that specialises in reality plays. It comprises 30 youngsters, and performs regular rehearsal between 5 pm and 7 pm at Chennai’s K K Nagar. Chimes in Jayaprakash, the rehearsal director: “See, we have 30 people, but not everyone is trained in acting.
So we have to teach them.” Significantly, Che Guevara has its original version in Malayalam and played almost 300 stages in Kerala, winning at least 20 awards, one of them national. The script is by Karivellur Murali. As for director Anand, Che has been his favourite hero from childhood days. “So when the idea of a play came to my mind, I just started writing the script. But later Pattanam Rashid, (a well-known make-up artist) told me about a Malayalam version of it having already been made. I immediately rang up Murali and got his permission to translate the script into Tamil,” recalls Anand.
But here comes a big issue. Kerala being communist territory, the audience there has few problems with such revolutionary themes. But the situation is somewhat different in Tamil Nadu.
“I have been acting for 18 years, and I know the taste of our Tamil audience. So I made some changes in the script. For example, to get a real impact, we have included the scene where Che’s hands are cut off before he is executed,” he says.
There are 12 scenes in the play. It begins with Fidel Castro talking to the statue of Che. The story then goes back to Che’s younger days when he was a medical student.
It traces the growth of the revolutionary, his love affair and guerrilla wars.
However, the turning point is the meeting between Che and Castro in Mexico, which led to many popular revolts in Latin American countries in the 1950s.
The play takes you to countries like Argentina, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba and Bolivia. “We have done the setting after referring to the landscapes of these countries through the Internet. Add to this, we use a good mix of lights,” says Jayaprakash, a software engineer by profession who later quit the job and studied acting in Washington.
Che Guevara will be staged in Chennai at the end of December. Both Anand and Jayaprakash are hopeful that the troupe will repeat the success that the Malayalam version had in Kerala. “The only worry,” says Anand, “is that we, the regional language troupes, don’t get the support many English drama troupes enjoy. English plays have takers everywhere because they have money and support. At the same time, it is difficult to get sponsors for a Tamil play.”
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