Honestly, I had never imagined that the agriculture officer, the wretched and abhorrent Sachin Patekar, could be so amusing. There may be other celebrated theatre groups who might adapt the book, but I will never be able to recreate the feelings I had while watching this. It was truly moving,” a leading publication had quoted writer Sonara Jha as saying after she watched SRM University’s theatrical adaption of her book Foreign, at The Hindu Lit for Life, a literature festival held in January this year.
Kushal Lalvani, 21-year-old undergraduate journalism student of SRM University, Chennai, who directed the play says it was surprising, as they had just formed their group. “We’re just a bunch of students from the journalism department interested in theatre. We don’t even have a name. The Lit Fest was our first performance and we were an instant hit with the audience,” he says, adding that Foreign was about farmer suicides in Vidarbha and that they had adopted a simple text for the narration. The core team comprises Kushal, Sandra AK, Thejaswin V, Nikhil Yadav, Ashwin Krishnan, Sneha Prakash, Shilpa Nair and Venkatesh Prasath. The group went on to get a special mention at Vellore Institute of Technology’s cultural festival Rivera for a dramatic monologue they performed called Untitled.
MGR-Crea Shakti, a city-based professional theatre group held a competition for campus theatre groups in September this year to commemorate Shakespeare’s birth anniversary, and SRM put up an adaptation of Macbeth titled Macbeth in Madras and won. “We had included parts about the Chennai mafia too! In all earnestness, I wanted to have the script in Tamil but couldn’t do it because of time constraints,” says Kushal who also doubles as the scriptwriter of the group.
The self-financed team is eagerly awaiting their first ticketed show at Music Academy in February next year. “We are doing two stage productions for Crea Shakti as a part of their campus theatre initiative,” he says. When asked if they look up to any theatre personalities, he reminisces about a performance by the Royal Shakespeare Club where one of the actors, Joy Bhattacharjee, had a role that required him to laugh continuously on stage. “I later learned that his father had passed away just that morning and yet he had gone on stage. Now that’s real dedication!” he exclaims.
suraksha@newindianexpress.com