Anton Chekhov’s short stories and plays continue to appeal for its marvellous dialogue and insight into human nature. Toto Funds the Arts and Rafiki present An Evening With Chekhov , featuring three of his plays and one short story — Swan Song , A Reluctant Tragic Hero , The Harmfulness of Tobacco and A Man with a Violent Temper .
The play will not only be interesting for the script and performances, but also appealing for its theme — stories of men who rant about their unfortunate circumstances, for which they blame the domineering and manipulative women in their lives.
Director Anmol Vellani chose Chekhov because “people were telling him that the plays he directed were really grave.”
To which his response “was to do something relatively light-hearted, tragi-comic and farcical.” On a more serious note, he explains that the decision to stage Chekhov happened by accident.
“We had initially decided to stage Wozeyck , but Anish Victor, who was playing the lead character broke his fingers in a bizarre accident three weeks before the show. So the choice was between giving up those dates and doing another play. While we were pondering this, we downloaded two of Chekhov’s plays and read them. I thought we could do these plays because it involved only one or two actors and fit into theme, which is about men feeling hen-pecked and oppressed by women.”
It was for the MetroPlus Theatre Festival in Coimbatore that Anmol adapted Chekhov’s short story A Man with a Violent Temper. ,
Anmol elucidates on the reasons behind Chekhov moulding the characters the way he did. “He is not implying that women are bad or oppressive, he asks us to look at these characters a little carefully, maybe they aren’t telling the entire truth or are as responsible for their state of affairs that they find themselves in as much as anyone else. It works at these two levels — at one level they rant about their circumstances, at another, the audience is provoked to ask questions.”
The plays, Anmol observes, are essentially about human nature. “Our tendency to assume that our situations are due to other people, to suffer from self-conceit and this image of ourselves, are not one that other’s have of us.
Those frailties are explored in these plays and Chekhov wants to make these characters familiar to us. His tongue was firmly in his cheek when he wrote these characters.”
In his time, Chekhov tried to get away from the very broad acting styles that he had seen on stage.
“He introduced a certain almost a realistic way of portraying characters. Therefore, his plays are not out-and-out comedies because there are always tragic elements underlying them. They are tragi-comic, which doesn’t play in a broad vaudeville style,” Anmol explains further.
Anmol has a distinct directorial style. “It has, perhaps, become, very fashionable to direct through a process of workshops and let the visual of the production emerge somehow. I never do a play unless I can visualise it. I frame the production in a certain way and get actors to work within that frame. Within that they have a leeway of doing a lot of things and sometimes what they do might actually change the framework slightly, but it is unfair to expect actors to improvise just like that. All improvisation has to take place within a framework.”
The plays will be performed by a strong cast, Anish Victor, Sachin Gurjale, Sharanya Ramprakash, Nakul Bhalla, Ashish D’Abreo and Ravindra Vijay at Ranga Shankara on September 6 and 7 at 7.30 p.m. Tickets are available at >www.bookmyshow.com and >www.indianstage.in .
