This has been a year of highs for JustUs Repertory and artistic director Gowri Ramnarayan is rightly happy. “Proud, actually of a group that has just completed a decade and how eventful the milestone year has been,” beams Gowri. A new play, revival of a few and much more have happened in the past few months.
When Things Fall Apart was premiered, and the plays — Dark Horse, Water Lilies and Night’s End — were revived. The calendar included a conference of Chennai theatre groups and the release of a book of the Repertory’s plays.
On the personal front, 2017 has been memorable for Gowri. Akash Khorana staged her translation of Vijay Tendulkar's Friend’s Story , and Mohit Takalkar directed her Mathemagician, translated by Pakistani writer Tariq Siddiqui. “The Urdu version was an entirely different experience,” observes Gowri. “I discovered my own work,” she adds about the play, which was staged at the Prithvi Theatre festival in Mumbai, last week.
The crowning glory is yet to come. One of the repertory’s old plays, Night’s End, is going to London. The British mainstream Soho Theatre has invited JustUs Repertory to stage the play — November 27-December 2. Ahead of that it will be staged on November 19 at R.R. Sabha, Chennai, in its renovated auditorium.
Absorbing clash
In Night’s End, matters of ecology are deftly woven into a plot of romance in the backdrop of a forest and its inhabitants. Krishnan Nair runs away from his home in Kerala to become a forest guard in a Rajasthan tiger reserve. The story (by Gowri Ramnarayan, who has also directed it) traces his efforts to save the tiger from poachers. He ropes in the tribals for this task and soon the operation escalates into an absorbing clash of love, betrayal and passion involving a slew of characters. A tribal woman, Chandni Mogiya, with whom Krishnan Nair falls in love, provides the romantic element.
Sheejith Krishna
It is worth-mentioning that the lead actors Sheejith Krishna (Krishnan Nair) and Akhila Ramnarayan (Chandni) have played the roles in all the shows of the play from 2012, when it was premiered — travelling with it to New Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Kochi, Jaipur and Los Angeles (USA). The only time they did not perform was in Sweden where two Swedish actors did a dramatised reading of Night's End at an international playwrights' conference in Stockholm.
Says Akhila: “I have had the great privilege of being with Night’s End — which I feel is Gowri Ramnarayan’s best play — evolving with it. I’ve seen at close hand how Sheejith Krishna brings grace, vulnerability, and soul to his portrayal of a lonely Krishnan Nair. In a sense, our challenges as actors have been diametrically opposite. I had to go beyond my comfort zone — the written and spoken word — and fully embrace stylised gesture and movement as integral to my character’s communication. Sheejith, who is a superb dancer and choreographer, had to augment the language of the body that comes so naturally to him, with speech. I feel we have both grown artistically as a result, pushed in directions we perhaps never imagined we would go.”
Night’s End will be staged at the R.R. Sabha, Mylapore, on November 19, 6.30 p.m.
