A new revival of Prithviraj Kapoor’s Deewar , directed by Sunil Shanbag, premiered at the Prithvi Theatre Festival earlier this month. First performed in 1945, the allegorical tale is set in a fictional jagir , where landowners and peasants live in wistful congruence till a visiting couple from a foreign land, with ulterior motives to boot, throws a spanner in the works, creating a wedge between once devoted zamindari brothers, Ramesh (Raghav Dutt) and Suresh (Sudhir Pandey). In many ways, the new production is a nod to old theatre, a gently tongue-in-cheek homage. There is a large painted backdrop stretching into the distance. The facade of a haveli’s courtyard is recreated in some detail. Villainous characters are accompanied by signature tunes, and evil laughs. Portents are signalled by thunder and rain. Deewar knowingly revels in these moments, but doesn’t wallow in them, moving swiftly ahead to the business in hand. Broad melodrama, almost expected of a 1940s play, is thus tempered down and instantly painted over with a modernistic palette.
Relevant themes
Shanbag works with a marked push and pull of sensibilities, taking on a now problematic play that has its own place in history, and a political message that hasn’t quite dated. To deal with his self-professed anxiety about the play’s politics of representation, he casts Kapoor’s play, scripted by Inder Raj Anand, within a larger narrative of contemporary discourse using the prism of two latter-day researchers, Lekha and Rishabh (Kalyanee Mulay and Abhinav Grover respectively). While the time-travelling duo double up as actors in the play as it might originally have been staged, they provide a commentary of asides that tries to make sense of Deewar ’s appeal. This is certainly well-meaning.
For instance, a feudal aristocracy as a welfare state is an egregiously fallacious notion that deserves to be call out. Similarly, scenes are modified to allow the working class greater agency in the play’s outcome. Episodes from the freedom struggle, like the Chauri Chaura incident, are grafted into the narrative. On many occasions, however, the interventions appear to be spoon-feeding the audience inferences already easily drawn from the material in hand. The verbal sparring comes across almost as didactic as the play they're seeking to cast a subversive eye upon. A progressive spirit infused throughout the play could’ve arguably drawn greater dividends than the piecemeal efforts by over-eager narrators ready to pounce upon each nugget of insight like it were manna from the heavens, while congratulating themselves along the way. That said, there is a parable of a talking mirror that feeds its owner’s delusions, another allusion to sweet-talking colonisers, that is spiritedly performed by the duo.
Although the vintage play within has its longueurs, Shanbag works well to bring out its stronger moments. Trishla Patel as one half of the visiting couple, clad in European attire, plays out her machinations with characteristic aplomb, and never veers into the campiness that informs the usual depiction of imperialists. Her cold, calculating veneer juxtaposes well with the so-called Eastern compassion of the feudal household.
Between contradictions
The play carries the weight of Western stereotyping, but that is understandable given its original context. Pandey and Dutt are in good form, allowing themselves to be swayed by a sentimentality that is never once contrived. Despite the occasional ironical touch, Shanbag allows the tropes of melodrama to play out in a sincere and heartfelt rather than emotionally manipulative manner. There is a delightful scene in which Patel attempts to teach Pandey and the women in the household a parlour dance. It is a set-piece that is at once lightly comic and deeply painful. Pandey demonstrates how his old-school presence hasn’t crossed its sell-by date and isn’t likely to. But the casting of cultural activist Dhamma Rakshit as a peasant does little to alleviate the play’s contradictions, although he gives voice to a wealth of protest songs.
It is disconcerting that to signal them as ‘the other’, Patel and her cohort use chaste Urdu, but Shanbag attempts to neutralise this with Mulay’s and Grover’s unaffected modern verbiage. Grover’s invoking of Raj Kapoor seems a tad misplaced even if the showman had played the same character in Deewar ’s original run — the play itself pre-dates his trademark tramp persona that Grover ingratiatingly channelises. Perhaps, that was a way of living up to its billing as an anniversary production. In many ways, Shanbag cannot fully neutralise what is essentially a product of its times, which beggars the questions of whether the play could’ve worked better if it were a straight-up adaptation, and whether the past needs to be enshrined in the comfortable politics of our time.
