The titles of Abhishek Majumdar's plays don't tell us much. Instead, they beguile. Sample this – “An Arrangement of Shoes”, “Afterlife of Birds”, even “Harlesden High Street.” If these titles give you a whiff of comedy, then you have been successfully deceived. Abhishek's plays delve deep into issues of identity, nationalism, migration, memory and loss. The playwright-director laughs off the seeming incongruity. “I have never been very conscious of it. Nevertheless, irony is important in all kinds of drama. Human life is also about things that go wrong, but simpler joys should be cherished whatever be the circumstances. Maybe that's why….,” Abhishek trails off, touching upon the nuggets in the plays from which these titles were born.
Abhishek and his Bangalore-based Indian Ensemble will perform their latest play, “Afterlife of Birds”, as part of the International Theatre Festival of Kerala in Kozhikode, Thrissur and Thiruvananthapuram. The play opened at the Ranga Shankara in Bangalore in December and has also travelled to the theatre festival in Bareilly. Abhishek, who earlier won the MetroPlus Playwright Award for “Harlesden High Street”, gave us some hints of what was to come in this new play in a telephone interview from Thiruvananthapuram.
“Afterlife of Birds”, he explains, took time to come into its own. It began with a workshop with actors Arundhati Nag and Revathy exploring the idea of women and their migration. The play gradually acquired layers from different human stories linked to terrorism.
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Abhishek the director and playwright is keenly aware of the perspective of an actor, for he too began as one. “I used to do a lot of acting in my first six to seven years in theatre and was fundamentally an actor. But I have not acted in the past five years as I got more involved in writing,” he says.
However, his experiences as an actor immensely helped Abhishek the writer. “Acting helped me understand the grammar of drama. When I write I always see if it will be fun to perform.”
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As a Bengali who grew up in Delhi, pursued Physics at Delhi University and later studied at the National Institute of Technology, Trichy, and is now settled in Bangalore and married to a South Indian, Abhishek is defined by many cultural influences. “I am comfortable at all these places. These multiple influences have made me aware that there is no one truth. The disadvantage is that it is difficult for me to write about a typical Bengali family. I do miss the powerful, local writing, and I am rooted in multiplicities,” says Abhishek.
Working mostly in English theatre, Abhishek is glad that there is constant give-and-take among theatre groups. According to him, close associations with various groups will help evolve an English theatre culture too. If regional theatre always had a powerful history, English theatre in India is still nascent, he adds. “Our sensibility is relatively new,” he says.
Abhishek and his Indian Ensemble are working on a new play in Hindi. “It is a monologue to be performed by Adhir Bhat telling the tale of a Kashmiri Pandit boy who left the State during the troubled years, and parallel to it will be the story of a Muslim boy who stayed back.”
“After life of Birds”
Directed by Abhishek Majumdar
The play will be performed at Tagore Hall on February 5 at 6.30 p.m.