Sunil Rawat proved his mettle as a dramatist with his acting and direction in the final play of the Saksham Theatre Festival at Akshara theatre in New Delhi last weekend. His troupe performed a Hindi adaptation of Italian playwright Dario Fo’s most famous play “Accidental Death of an Anarchist” (1970).
The play deals with the death of a railway trade unionist, framed for a bomb attack, in police custody. The adaptation by Amitabh Srivastava drew great acclaim in 1997, when it was presented by Asmita theatre, starring Piyush Mishra as the maniac. A later performance was prohibited in Ahmedabad, as it showed the police in negative light.
Like Asmita, Rawat’s alma mater, Saksham too included recent themes like the Bhagalpur blindings and Right-wing terror. Saksham’s police characters too splendidly infused absurdist song and dance in their humour. But the star of the show was Rawat who played the maniac.
The maniac impersonates a judge inquiring into the death of a terror suspect who fell out of the window of a fourth floor police cell. He then impersonates a lame forensic expert in front of a journalist, Fatima Abbasi (Pooja Dhyani), interviewing the police superintendent (Praveen Yadav). Finally, he reveals his identity as the head of a revolutionary organisation, leave the rest of the cast with a timed explosive.
Rawat through his theatrics and pot-shots at all power structures — the State, the press, the judiciary — effectively represents Fo’s idea of the farcical status quo, where truth is subjective and justice is absent. He switches between his multiple characters with ease. His lines are long and breathless, but he pulls them off amazingly.
The clumsy and diabolical police officers, encouraged and confused by the maniac, cook up multiple stories to justify the captive’s death. The most honest character was the constable played by Sandeep Singh. The constable plays the role of a jester, unknowingly mocking the single-mindedness of his bosses. He makes the joke of the tragedy in a way that it enhances the gravity of Fo’s argument. Sandeep Singh, a regular in Saksham’s plays, earlier played a lunatic in “Toba Tek Singh”.
The success of the play was its incorporation of contemporary themes. The dialogue has space for serious debate, like the one between Abbasi and the maniac on whether India is ripe for a protracted civil war. A lot of this, Delhi’s theatre has inherited from its doyens. The credit of effectively living out this legacy on stage goes to the director.
