Excelsior Correspondent
JAMMU, Jan 5: Theatre group ‘Natrang’ here today staged a new play ‘Mulaqaat’ based on Vaclav Havel’s Czech Play ‘Audience’ which was adapted in Hindi by Naveen Pant and Dr. Sharada Yadav.
The play was a debut venture in direction by Mohd. Yaseen who has an experience of 19 years of acting and allied theatre works.
Yaseen is also a national fellowship and scholarship holder from Union Ministry of Culture.
The play revolves around a meeting between brewery manager and employee ‘Vanek’. While the manager is clearly opening too many beers and inducing binge drinking, it is less clear what he wants from Vanek. ‘Audience’ was the first of Vaclav Havel’s partly autobiographical one-act plays known as the “Vanek Trilogy” based on his experience of being subject to forced work while under constant harassment from the then system. The character of ‘Vanek’ was closest to Havel himself, it tells of a dissident writer who is forced to work in a brewery, so that he can contribute to society rather than be an intellectual bourgeois burden. In a friendly talk, or possibly an interrogation, it was clear that the brewery manager desperately wants something, but it was not at all clear what that something is.
The play ‘Mulaqaat’ in a dramatic way, depicts a rendezvous of two different identities with different background and social status which yields a conversation which is nonfigurative yet concrete in certain manner. At the end of the play, which carried many symbolic and partially direct references to the oppression of that time, the brewery manager was so drunk that he even forgets that they ever have had a meeting and he greets and treats ‘Vanek’ as if he has just arrived.
Artists who performed in the play were Brijesh Avtar Sharma and Sushant Singh Charak. The lights were designed and operated by Neeraj Kant and the Music was rendered by Mihir Gujral. The presentations were done by Mahikshit Singh and the hall management was looked after by Gopi Sharma, Sumit Raina, Arti Devi and Lovely Sharma.
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