A scene from Shuturmurg

Local Hindi theatre received a boost with the latest productions by two relatively new groups consisting mainly of young members. Both of them tackled plays that had created quite a stir upon their first appearance in the 1960s, but hardly anyone knows of today.

Little Thespian, who have attempted some challenging works of late, chose to do Gyandev Agnihotri’s Shuturmurg. Shyamanand Jalan had staged it here in 1967, but when Mohan Maharishi followed suit in Delhi the next year, the performances were stopped on account of the play’s pronounced political critique. Agnihotri depicts a king megalomaniacally erecting a statue as a panacea for his country’s ills. In the most inflammatory scene, an emaciated, dying old man is carried in on a stretcher; he looks like Mahatma Gandhi and breathes his last in front of our eyes.

One wonders whether the director, Azhar Alam, knew of the impending elections this year, and deliberately selected Shuturmurg as a comment. Of course, its satire is not partisan at all. As Azhar puts it in his director’s note, it deals with “human nature, which, when faced with reality, tries to deny its very existence” (just like the proverbial ostrich in the title). Further, “The general public, in spite of being aware about the dual nature of their representatives, are, time and again, exploited.”

In hindsight, though, Shuturmurg sounds too simplistically schematic, as literally black and white as Uma Jhunjhunwala’s set design. She captures the essence of Agnihotri’s script, but the text itself is too essentialist to catch the postmodern fancy for complexity.

Curiously, her design and Azhar’s stylised direction, by which the actors speak and behave mechanically, both recall Jalan’s production.

The recently established Proscenium Art Centre put on Kisi Ek Phul ka Nam Lo, by the once-popular Gujarati dramatist Madhu Rye, in the Hindi translation by Jyoti Vyas. This is the metatheatrical murder mystery which so mesmerised Mahesh Dattani, watching it as a child, that he claims he became hooked to theatre for good. It does belong to the realms of coups de theatre, beginning virtually with a bang as one of the performers suddenly shoots a spectator sitting in the front row. It then unfolds as a play actually rehashed by a troupe. Yet with such a sensational start in Act 1, inevitably some slackening takes place in the next three acts.

Uncannily like a variation of Vijay Tendulkar’s Silence! The Court Is In Session, both written in the same year (1967), it unravels the self-centred motives in every character’s relationship with the highly-strung heroine, played by Nivedita Bhattacharjee.

In full control of the tension, Koushik Chatterjee makes a promising directorial debut and the cast supports him ably, deserving some mainstage exposure beyond the rather low-profile and cramped experimental room of Proscenium’s Art Centre.