Part of the Gang | The Indian Express

Part of the Gang | The Indian Express

Part of the Gang

Atul Kumar on exploring content and form of theatre through three new productions

Written by Dipanita Nath | Published: July 20, 2018 12:01:44 am

Detective 9-2-11 is a tribute to the golden years of Hindi cinema

When Atul Kumar ends his email with “Love, and God save us all”, he is not being devout. The Mumbai theatre director spent the beginning of 2018 creating two intensely avant-garde productions. Then, in one month this summer, “working eight hours a day, going boom boom boom”, he finished a third play, Detective 9-2-11, a racy, high-adrenaline, gangster film noir, Hitchcock-meets-Bollywood comedy. The Hindi version of the play is titled Detective Nau-Do-Gyarah.

Detective 9-2-11, a part of theatre festival Aadyam 2018, is a tribute to the golden years of Hindi cinema. “Rajat Kapoor, my partner in crime, and I would watch films every day at Shakuntalam theatre in Delhi, from Howrah Bridge to The Maltese Falcon. What I did not know was that my love for cinema would combine with my clowning and Chaplin love to create a khichdi that is this gangster film noir on stage,” says Kumar.

Atul Kumar

He presented a version of the play, titled 39 Ka AnkDaa, at the National School of Drama in Delhi this year but the new piece is developed with stellar performers, such as Neil Bhoopalam and Gagan Dev Riar. He keeps the story simple — a guy suspected of a murder, is on the run, meets a bevy of beauties, including a KGB operative, and, finally, finds the villain. The play’s challenge is in handling a number of forms, from the Jacques Lecoq movements to Tom-and-Jerry chases to 11 actors playing over a 100 characters, to the light and shades on stage to live music.

The director, in his forties, has never presented a play that did not step outside the comfort zones of theatre. The Company Theatre, his group, turns 25 this year, and one of its most successful productions, Piya Behrupiya was Twelfth Night told as a nautanki. Noises-Off captured a synergy of action with a complex set while Khwaab Sa was an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream through contemporary dance. Detective 9-2-11 will join Kumar’s line-up of big-ticket superhits, but it is the two other plays that represent his idea of real work.

The first of these, called Loop 20-20, started off as an artist’s response into the near future that is 2020 for Mumbai. The piece was based on a one-act play by Peter Handke, The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, which focuses on a day in the life of a town square. Kumar called upon 50 performers and pushed them to reflect on their darkest and deepest selves, and bring forth whatever was most disturbing, urgent and pressing. These narratives, translated into action, form the core of Loop 20-20, which was staged as part of the fringe Kala Ghoda earlier this year.

In broad daylight, with traffic in full flow around Asiatic Society and Horniman Circle Gardens, the production presented actions such as a man sitting on the road, in the middle of a cross-section, and eating food from a thali as pedestrians went by in all directions. A woman, with a table tennis racket, bounced a ping pong ball incessantly, not letting it fall, as she moved through a crowd. Another man walked around with a bucket of water, stopping before random people, and rinsing, cleaning and wiping their feet with a piece of cloth before moving on. Another woman sat in a cardboard box, all shrivelled into herself, coming out occasionally only to sweep the floor around her before going back in.

“This is more of an expressionistic piece where I let each artist tap their stories. Some were extremely personal and specific and others were much larger and connected to a collective memory of a community. In both cases, they reflected something about the past and, thereby, the future of this person and this city,” says Kumar.

In the play This Is All There Is When There Is All This, Atul Kumar plays a silver-haired gent, seated and sometimes dancing inside a glass box dressed in a vest and pyjamas;

He often says he is “an actor who is pretending to be a director”. A part of Rajat Kapoor’s play, Hamlet — The Clown Prince, his latest role is in a play that was the next step from Loop 20-20. Titled This Is All There Is When There Is All This, it has him as a silver-haired gent carrying a heavy stone in a loop across the stage and, then, dancing inside a glass box dressed in nothing but a vest and pyjamas. The play is an orchestrated chaos in which a large number of performers move through the space, meeting, colliding, and sometimes just missing each other. The scenes are eerily familiar to real life — a man trips over nothing, a constantly bickering couple, twins stuck in a sneezing fit, and a girl who must measure distances to nowhere.

“This Is All There Is When There Is All This had over eight shows in Prithvi Theatre. People either loved it or hated it completely because it was not regular theatre,” says Kumar. No major festival is interested in either of these edgy productions and Kumar doesn’t sound surprised. “Even if no one will support us, I will do more shows of Piya Behrupiya and make a few more Detective 9-2-11 and with the money we make through those productions I will reach out with these other shows to larger audiences and make more theatre like this, only because we think it is important for people to see this.”

Detective Nau-Do-Gyarah will be staged at Kamani auditorium on August 4 and 5 at 7.30 pm. Tickets on bookmyshow.com

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