The penultimate day of the National Theatre Festival here was marked by two plays of distinctive styles and subjects, although both of them were based on short stories. The play Ekantham directed by Sreejith Ramanan is based on Anton Chekhov’s short story The Bet . The characters in the play are caught in complex life situations, in the thin line that separates reality and imagination.
The play tells the story of a youth who is sentenced to 15 years of solitary confinement. The base story borrowed from Chekhov is placed in the contemporary Indian context.
Mr. Ramanan is also an actor and is currently a faculty at the School of Drama and Fine Arts at the University of Calicut. He had won the State government’s award for the best actor in the year 2003.
Tributes to motherhood
Based on short stories by Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, the drama Bharat Matha Ki Jai directed by Lokesh Jain is a veritable tribute to motherhood. The drama portrays the stories of five elderly women — one from Pune who identifies herself with freedom fighters, a weaver from Panipat who donates all her jewellery for the freedom movement, a Brahmin woman who revolts against the conservative tradition of her caste and embraces those from other religions and castes, a woman who migrated to India from Peshawar following the partition, and the mother of the writer who lost all her property in the communal carnage, yet refused to migrate to Pakistan.
Chillara Samaram
Curtain on the 15th National Theatre Festival will fall here on Friday with the play Chillara Samaram by Ponnani-based Little Earth Theatre. Seventeen plays in nine languages were staged at nine-day festival.
