After their last (and first) collaboration together — the marital comedy Bas...Tum Aur Hum — writer-director Veena Bakshi is back in the Ank stable with a wedding farce this time. Bakshi’s Hamari Neeta ki Shaadi with the Hindi theatre group premieres at the NCPA this weekend. This is Ank’s 85th production in a little more than 40 years (it was established in 1976), and Bakshi is one of several ‘outside’ directors that the outfit brought on board after the passing away of guiding light Dinesh Thakur in 2012. The flag has been kept flying by Thakur’s wife and long-time collaborator Preeta Mathur, who stars in this new production alongside old regular Aman Gupta. Mathur and Gupta play Kaveri and Dashrath respectively — harried parents to a headstrong bride — (the eponymous Neeta) who has locked herself in the bathroom on the day of her wedding’s haldi ceremony, overwhelmed by the onslaught of rituals so typical of North Indian nuptials.
Wedding prep
Known for her National Award-winning film featuring Naseeruddin Shah, The Coffin Maker , Bakshi wrote an original script from the kernel of an idea she discovered by chance. An anonymous Marathi short story she read on a scrap of paper used to serve jhal muri by a roadside vendor provided the starting point for what ultimately became a comment on the ostentatiousness of Indian weddings, stopping just short of being an indictment of the institution itself. “I find both weddings and funerals inherently funny,” says Bakshi, who wanted to lampoon upper class foibles and hypocrisy. For Mathur, the generation gap between Kaveri and Neeta lies at the very heart of the play’s contradictions. On the rehearsal floors, Bakshi kept fine-tuning the script, “As a writer-director, I’m much more in control of the script although there is the danger of getting overly attached to the text.” Actors breathing life into her words remains one of the great pay-offs of theatre. Mathur adds, “The fact that she personally knew the actors who would ‘people’ her play, worked to her advantage.” Typically, an Ank production employs actors from its in-house repertory; Bakshi wrote her script keeping this in mind.
Owing to touring constraints, the play doesn’t attempt to mimic the over-the-top opulence of an actual ceremony. The set design by Dhanendra Kawade is minimalist, although wedding paraphernalia — costumes, gift packages, auspicious sweetmeats, floral decorations — abound in a mise en scène that effectively captures a household frenetically preparing for a wedding function. “Nowadays Hindi theatre has to travel a lot, and we cannot always recreate heavy sets to Mumbai standards or specifications,” says Mathur, mentioning that Ank productions frequently tour to cities like Jaipur, Alwar, Indore, Jabalpur or Bikaner. This has been the production house’s schtick. Apart from forging a distinctive space for Hindi theatre in Mumbai, they have also been responsible for taking the translated works of noted Marathi playwright Vijay Tendulkar, like Jaat Hi Poochho Sadhu Ki or Khamosh! Adalat Jaari Hai , to Hindi-speaking centres.
Happily married
In recent years, the ‘wedding play’ with its inbuilt drama and non-stop shenanigans has made its appearance on the Mumbai stage, although not to the same degree as its overblown cinematic counterpart. The all-woman production Dekh Behen , from Akvarious Productions, took us into the hilariously fraught world of bridesmaids with crosses to bear (and some to spare). Purva Naresh’s Ladies Sangeet had its own Pandora’s box of hidden caprices. A common factor in both productions, apart from the casting of Shikha Talsania as the brides, was that behind the giddy cheer-leading squads of matrimony, human malaises lurch unchecked, and unspoken for. This was also the case with Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding , in both its film and stage versions. Hamari Neeta ki Shaadi ’s brand of satire is likely much more light-hearted, and it is a comedy of errors, that all weddings are perfectly capable of morphing into, that is its resolute mainstay.
Hamari Neeta Ki Shaadi, on July 13 and 14 at 5 p.m at Godrej Dance Theatre, NCPA; for more details, visit bookmyshow.com
