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Where danger lurks

NANDINI NAIR

Pandies’ Theatre once again proved that reality is grimmer than fiction.



Reality BitesPandies’ Theatre uses young talent to create moving accounts.

Pandies’ Theatre, a Delhi-based theatre group, is neither timid nor polite. It deals with frightening realities. It recently staged “Danger Zones” at Shri Ram Centre. In three tight episodes it explores issues of child rights, homo sexuality and the plight of the marginalised. Directed by Sanjay Kumar and scripted by Anuradha Marwah, Sanjay Kumar and Anand Prakash, neither the script nor the presentation adhere to niceties and politeness.

The first sub-story is born from the recent Nithari murders. Pandies’ involvement with Nithari pre-dates the Nithari headlines. They started theatre workshops with slum children in an informal school – Saksham – in May 2006. The present play ties the experiences of the workshops within an over-arching urban narrative. It uses Robert Browning’s “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” as a sinister tale of stolen dreams and false promises.

An odd casting leaves the audience disoriented initially. Neither the dialogues nor the appearance of the characters help to locate the setting. The dialogues are artificially broken into bad English. The makeup and costumes are not true of the characters that the actors are playing.

But once these initial confusions are cleared, the power of the story takes over. The play is set around the story of a young girl teaching in a slum school. On one hand she tries to make these children dream. On the other, she has to deal with her parents who equate class with criminal behaviour.

But the children she teaches have been wrenched of their childhood. The innocence and simplicity of childhood have been replaced by alcohol cravings and lascivious exchanges.
Unsettling

A young actor on stage playing a ten-year-old and saying, “Yeh maal only for watching, not for sale,” and going on to comment about, “that bitch in heat,” is sure to discomfit even the sharpest cynic. These children are forced to be adult in all the sordidness that the adult world connotes. But beneath this façade of adult behaviour there exists the dream of pink ice-creams and red strawberries and gigantic swings. The most human character is the teacher of the night school. When the children disappear, she is not concerned with rumours and speculations, instead her only request is, “Somebody think of the children…”

The second play within the play is a powerful account of a lesbian couple. The episode is based on intensive research, spanning one year, on lesbian couples in the slums and bastis of Delhi. The script also addresses the turmoil of a man trapped in a woman’s body. The woman is castigated, ridiculed and even assaulted for being different.

It opens with the simple line, “Yeh meri kahaani hai. Mai Nafisa se pyaar karti hu.” A simple assertion, but the story is a complex one of forbidden love striving against shackled relationships and dogmatic diktats. The young girl has to deal with decrees, “Aurat ki jagah mard ke neeche hai, aurat ke baghal mein nahi.” Acted without inhibitions and with raw power, the story hits hard with the injustice that the couple faces. But the plot is guilty of combining too many issues into one episode. Religious fanaticism is included in a cursory way. It is not dealt with and takes away from the original issue.

Continuing with its attention to the marginalised, the third episode scrutinises issues of SEZs and who is called upon to make what sacrifices.

If the strength of theatre is to jolt the audience into reckoning with realities, Pandies’ theatre did just that once again.