In the early 1980s, actor and playwright Narendra Prasad wrote a play on the tragic life of a woman who was lost in her fantasy world.
The play which was published in a literary magazine was never performed on stage.
Now, the drama troupe Natyagriham, of which he was one of the founders, will be bringing on stage the play titled ‘Rani Ammachi’.
Directing the play will be M.K. Gopalakrishnan, one of Narendra Prasad’s contemporaries and a co-founder of Natyagriham.
“The story is about a woman named Sundari Chellamma, who used to live by the wayside in the Fort area in Thiruvananthapuram city. Old-timers are familiar with the story of how she was deeply worshipful of the king and how this bhakti and love caused her to lose her mind. She left her family and home and started living on the road near the Padmanabhaswamy temple. Once Narendra Prasad pointed out this woman to me. Later, he wrote this play with her as the central character,” says Mr. Gopalakrishnan.
He says that the play talks about the larger issue of women who are marginalised in patriarchal societies. Narendra Prasad took her story and brought elements of fiction into it.
Kindred spirit“Narendra Prasad added one more character called Mathai to her story. He is another person living on the same street. He is also like her in that he is lost in his fantasy world of having a happy family life. These two people strike up an unlikely friendship,” he says.
The seeds of Natyagriham were sowed in the late 1970s, when Narendra Prasad, a college professor then, started writing plays for the annual theatre festival of the Postal Accounts employees. It became a full-fledged drama troupe in 1979 with acclaimed plays like ‘Souparnika’, ‘Ira’ and Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan’s Malayalam translation of Waiting for Godot. But by 1986, the theatre troupe slowed down and eventually stopped performing.
In 2013, Gopalakrishnan and other friends of Narendra Prasad got together to revive Natyagriham. The group organised a theatre festival consisting exclusively of playwright Omchery N.N. Pillai’s plays.
Last year, they paid a tribute to the group’s founder with a Narendra Prasad Theatre Festival, when his acclaimed plays were performed by various groups from across the State.
The play ‘Rani Ammachi’ will be staged at VJT Hall at 6 p.m. on July 19.
