Three Short Plays

Three Short Plays by Ranjit Hoskote, directed by Avaan Patel is a real treat to those interested in serious theatre and might prove to be extreme for those who are new to it.
The three short plays start with The Last Annal of Alamgir performed by Tom Alter and Avaan Patel. The play is powerful and heartrending portrait of Aurangzeb’s waning years. He is, and is not the Mughal tyrant Aurangzeb: the author takes deliberate liberties with history, melds past with future, reveals the emotional undercurrents of public events. ‘The Last Annal of Alamgir’ is a study in impending deathWe find Alamgir who is powerful and sometimes cruel journeying through his own life, pondering over the events that brought him to power and finally to the unkind southern neck of land, where he lies dying, trying to fight an opponent who cannot be won over. We see him in a different light—on the brink and vulnerable, and driven to invoke his angel—a character whom he refers to, but does not speak to directly. The angel in turn answers his call for help, but this is done in keeping with Aurangzeb’s convention of not speaking directly to her.
An interesting space is thereby created for the two characters to voice their thoughts

The show moves onto the next play Karna played by Gerish Khemani, Vivek Tandon, Danesh Khambatta & Vijay Varma – here the playwright has recrafted Bhasa’s text from Karnabharam that speaks of Karna’s coercions and mixed feelings and convictions and he presents Karna to today's audiences as a contemporary figure. The action in the play unfolds on what is Karna's last day in the battlefield of Kurukshetra. He has just learned that he is Kunti's first born and so is a brother to the Pandavas. When this information is revealed to him at the crucial moment of battle he is reminded of the curses that he had from his master Parsurama the great warrior and the priest whose cow he had mistakenly killed while roaming in the forest at night, whom he thought to be a demon lurking in the shadows. To add to Karna's burden the supreme trickster, King of Gods Indra arrives to ask for a suitable gift before he leaves for battle and tricks him to give away his armour of invincibility. Karna's inability to turn away anyone brings him to his fate.

The third play is Aftermath and is performed by all six actors is conceived of by Ranjit Hoskote as a ‘score for six voices’. The setting is a post - apocalyptic future, with an unidentified calamity destroying the civilisation, in the ruins six survivors - each affected by the calamity - find an archieve and each other. They address each other, not in the regular lineaments of social civility, but in fragments of texts that they half-remember, or find as they rummage through the archive. the play then moves on revealing that these six voices are figures from the history from different periods and societies, Ghalib and Gandhari, Lost and Sleeper, Shahid and Indra. Mr. hoskote has used sleep, wakefulness and initiation as metaphors and these dominate the script and performance. The dialogue between the characters unveils a potrait of war, the sorrow and the effects of it.

The play has been performed at various places in the city for months now and the team is coming again with more performances in Aug 09.