Lalit Gupta
JAMMU, Jan 23: ‘Ek Aur Durghatna’, Amitabh Srivastva’s Hindi adaptation of Dario Fo’s world famous play, ‘Death of An Anarchist’, was performed by Amateur Theatre Group as the penultimate production of ongoing Annual Drama Festival at auditorium of Government College for Women, Gandhi Nagar, here today.
Directed by Mohit Singh Chib, the play is a scathing critique of the murky side of the police force. The events of the play itself, however, are fictional. The play opens with an Inspector interrogating Sanki-The Maniac, a histrionic character, who however, constantly outsmarts the dim-witted Inspector and intercepts a phone call from another Inspector. The phone call lets the Maniac know that a judge is due at the police station to investigate the interrogation and death of the terrorist. Impersonating the judge, he gets the police to re-enact the events, in the actual fourth floor room, and also involves a woman journalist who is trying to probe the events.
The play ends with two alternative endings, one with journalist leaving the four policemen to be bombed and in the second, the journalist uncuffs the men who in turn handcuff her to the window frame leaving her to die. The Maniac then leaves the audience to decide what ending is best.
In keeping with immense possibilities of Dario Fo’s works for creative additions, dislocations and continually encouraging actors to improvise-today’s performance was also intelligently improvised to include number of references to terrorist attacks at different places and how innocent citizens are killed in fictitious encounters or falsely implicated by police in the country.
The play which also alluded to local situations with dialogs in Dogri and Kashmiri was very well received by the audience. Excellent display of coordination by entire cast, perfect timing of dialogs, movements and groupings, use of props, entries and exists, background music, sound and light effects resulted in a well-paced performance. The cast included Sunil Sharma as Sanki, Vivek Sangotra as Inspector Pahuja, Mohit Mehra as Inspector Vajpayi, Ayaan Ali as Superintendent, Ankit Sharma as Havaldar and Sakshi Kaul as Journalist.
Tomorrow the last play of festival ‘X-‘Reflections’, the Dogri adaptation of Dr Chander Shekar Kambar’s original Hindi play will be staged by Natraj Natya Kunj.
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