A playful rebellion

Madaiah, The Cobbler, a production by The Madras Players, comes alive with music, movements and some emotionally intense moments

November 09, 2017 04:03 pm | Updated 04:03 pm IST

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A power-hungry tyrant, a sadist Shani, the god, and a manipulative monk... what do a couple of guddas , a six-member nomadic cluster in search of jobs, food and money, do in this hostile ambience? Maybe, fight against the battle of evil or launch a resistance movement in the modern sense.

But, Kannada playwright, HS Shivaprakash, has a better and more eccentric idea. They perform a play. Madaiah, The Cobbler uses the agency of theatre as resistance. These easily relatable characters, who apparently belong to an archaic world, lend to the present narratives of power, marginalisation and displacement. The English translation of the work is adapted to stage and directed by award-winning playwright and filmmaker Prasanna Ramaswamy and presented by The Madras Players. Ramaswamy says, “What drew me to the play was its stunning contemporaneity and the challenge it threw as the text.”

The play is also about liberating oneself from the idea of gods and religion. God is presented as an idea of the man. “The text offers possibilities for the director to interpret. I think any work becomes theatre, only when it is interpreted,” says Ramaswamy.

The play that unravels in the fictitious kingdom of Bankapuri is more than a quarter-century old. But, it is contemporary. One of the six guddas , dons the narrator’s cap. One could read it as a way of empowering the marginalised to take the movement of resistance forward, says the director. “The guddas crown the king and make one among them a god, an avatar of Shiva. He is Madaiah, who is born to cobbler parents.” Ramaswamy has ensured that Madaiah has no power hegemony over the guddas . There is a playfulness with which the guddas praise him and sing and dance around him. “When you are happy, what do you do? You sing and dance. The guddas experience a joy in making a god out of him. While iconising, I needed to pick up a song from my memory and the Carnatic kriti, Kapali fitted in,” she says.

Music forms a narrative in itself. Be ready to be regaled with some melodic guitar riffs, rap notes, Carnatic aalaps and evocations. “When I think of theatre what comes to my mind is the word natyam , which is a combination of gitam , nrittam and vadyam . Music is very much part of the lingo. In fact, it is as important as spoken word in a play.” Movement is also a key element. The guddas break into rap dance, sway to lilting slow numbers and even sing a vachana of Akka Mahadevi, one of the early female Kannada poets.

Props, by the well-known artist Gurunathan, add yet another dimension to the play. The curtains with the paintings of contemporary city life milling with construction labourers and panel paintings with Indian motifs of elephants and sculptures, complement the sense of multiple timelines that Ramaswamy envisions. Every work is a culmination of her intellect and instinct, life experiences, books she has read and music she has listened to. “What excites me with each production is that I get to create my kind of universe in that play and the way it oscillates between wisdom and foolishness. And, during the play this “I” becomes “Us”.”

(The play will be staged at Museum Theatre, Egmore on November 17, 18 and 19 at 7.15 pm. For tickets, visit bookmyshow.com. Or call 9381911977.)

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