HYDERABAD: The poet, painter and playwright Gieve Patel had to say this about Sifar’s ‘The Wisest Fool on Earth’: “One of the most important plays written in India. Its authentic evocation of detail upon detail, from the annals of one kind of Bombay existence, and the creation of Jay— a remarkably vivid and thought-provoking character—give the play a very special place among the best achievements in modern Indian theatre.”
An upper-caste, able-bodied, unemployed man named Jay, finds himself locked up in a luxurious bathroom in one of Mumbai’s high-rises. Frustrated, he breaks into a monologue. Slowly, the contradictions and irrationalities tangled in a garb of sophistication and political correctness begin to reveal themselves, as layer by layer, various facets of Jay’s identity also get unveiled.
Feroze MNA, founder of Sifar and the performer of this monologue, said it took him two years to bring it from text to the stage. “R Raj Rao wrote this monologue in the 1990s. It came from the personal experiences of the writer who identifies as homosexual. I felt an urgency to present these experiences to the outer world. At the time when it was written, society was extremely unaccepting of people with gender and sexual diversity. I found that I too had some inhibitions of my own, that I had to overcome before performing this on stage and I had thought of myself as quite an open-minded person. Raj and my team were extremely supportive throughout that phase,” Feroze said.
Providing a short description of the character, Feroze said, “He is a non-vegetarian Brahmin who neither has money nor does he believe in having it. He believes in having sex regularly, likes to eat, take a nice shit and sleep. Of course, he is not accepted within his own community.”
Politically incorrect, sarcastic, and angst-ridden, this six-foot-tall male finds himself locked up in the bathroom of his partner’s house in a posh locality of Mumbai— lest the homosexual relationship or the sexual encounter be revealed to his father. Overtly, a misfit and an outcast, he has a lot to say about the hypocrisy of affluent societies as well as that of his own community, Feroze told CE.
After more than 12 shows in over a decade, Feroze says the world has slowly begun to accept this play but still has a long way to go. “People wrote to us saying that Sifar is not a theatre group that should pick up stories of such kind,” Feroze said.
Sifar, in some of its previous shows, has picked up stories that highlight intricacies of the society, presented through nuanced characters, like those in ‘Zoo ki Story’ and ‘Almost Flawless’.
However, the first expression Feroze had on his mind when CE asked about ‘The Wisest Fool on Earth’, he uttered, “It is a very difficult play.” He then added, “After 10 years, I know how to engage different sets of audiences. Even though it is difficult, I have tried to keep something for everybody in it. Such is the case with this monologue that those who are aware of the marginalised, on-the-edge existence of people from LGBTQAI communities, relate well with the play and those who don’t, find it disturbing.”
On stage, Feroze says he merely humanises the character, the real core is provided by Rao’s unabashed expression. “Accepting a play with both a scatological and a homosexual theme can make a conservative middle-class audience uncomfortable. But that is the whole purpose of the play, and indeed of all my writing—to jolt people out of their complacency,” Rao said.
When asked whether the theatrical enactment is better than the original, the writer said, “Feroze’s enactment of the play in Hindi and English seemed to gel more with the audience. His improvisations to contemporise the play also struck a chord with viewers. I’m more than pleased with his rendition of the monologue I wrote years ago.”