THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Those puppets had no strings attached and may be it was due to this that, puppeteer Matthias Kutcha gasped while carrying the rotund puppet of musician Rajad on stage. Meanwhile our protagonist Sanjay and the pretty young lady Nanditha, did not cause him much trouble.
Accompanied with soulful sitar music in the background, the Indo-German puppet-music-theatre ‘Sanjay and his Master’ was presented before a packed audience.
The story begins in the verdant countryside of Varanasi. The young and energetic chap Sanjay had been having an intense longing to learn music. Carrying his old sitar, he appears before the court-musician Rajad and begins learning music under his tutelage.
Soon he starts learning the lessons, the boy begins playing ‘sa ri ga ma’ and ‘ma pa dha ni’ but the guruji has no hope on him. But one day as if out of a sudden inspiration he begins playing the notes amazingly well. This juncture steers the course of action of the play.
Meanwhile guruji’s daughter Nanditha and Sanjay fall in love with each other.
Attaining mastery in music, Sanjay desires to be the musician at the king’s royal court. As per the king’s wish, no two musicians can be entertained at the same time. The only solution to this problem is to make both compete against each other and the winner would be made the court musician.
Sanjay, who is in a dilemma, cannot even quit as the king would execute the one who backs out from the challenge. Into this scene, a demon, (to be precise the conscience of ‘guruji’) starts playing the egotist role. Opening all evils of a Pandora’s box in his mind, the demon stands for the ‘super ego’ inside the mind of the human mind. It appears regularly until the full moon D-day of performance.
Yet the play concludes on a positive note where we see both Sanjay and his guruji escape punishment. Amid the tale of music, the plot also gives equal importance to romance and humour.
The plot is an adaptation of a story from Jataka tales. Directed by Dadi Pudumjee, the show was premiered in Hamburg on October 2011. Subroto Roy Chowdhury plays the sitar, Anjan Saha controls both sitar and vocal and Swapan Bhattacharya plays the tabla.
The play organised by Goethe-Zentrum was performed at Co-bank towers in the city the other day.