After travelling across the country over the last four years, Rosamma, the cantankerous cow, and her farm companions, will be in Bengaluru to bid farewell this weekend. The production of the children’s play, How Cow Now Cow , by Sandbox Collective, will have its final shows in Bengaluru this weekend. Based on Andri Beyeler’s Rosemarie the Cow , the play has been adapted to the Indian context.
Vinod Ravindran, director, says: “The central character is this cow who starts behaving badly with all the other animals by going up to them and yelling at them. It starts doing that to the farmer also. What happens to this cow and how things change forms the story.”
There have been 110 shows of the play, from Mumbai and Guwahati to New Delhi and Puducherry and it has been performed in several venues from National School of Drama, Ranga Shankara and Prithvi Theatre to schools, colleges, libraries, cafés and alternative spaces.
Vinod adds, “It is not just children who enjoy the play. I know a lot of people who have come without kids and have watched it multiple times. I also feel that a good children’s play should definitely work for adults as well.”
As for the theme or the meaning of the production, he says, “The play has a beautiful simplicity to it and yet it is powerful in many ways. You can make sense of it in your own way and who is it talking about and what it means. That kind of power is what, I think, makes a play even more beautiful than being straight and literal.”
Talking about what form the play takes, he says, “We use many devices in the performance. We have music, shadow puppetry, and objects as puppets (usually referred to as object theatre). We also use an overhead projector to create a certain kind of animation on a screen. It is interesting visually as well.”
As for the reason behind the decision to bring the curtains down on the production, Vinod says, “We have all decided that we need to move on. We get calls asking us to stage the play and then realise that most of us are not free. We have also done over 100 shows and feel like maybe it is a good time for us to close the show instead of letting it dissolve into oblivion. It is much better to say these are the last two shows and we will have a lot of fun doing them and that’s it.”
How Cow Now Cow will be staged at Shoonya on April 27 and April 28 at 7.30 pm. Tickets are priced at ₹ 250 and are available on bookmyshow.com
