Going Solo was a risk that paid sterling dividends

The Prithvi Theatre Festival is going international with its first halt in Dubai. Kunal Kapoor, the scion of the famous Kapoor khandaan and the big boss of Prithvi Theatre, in an interview with a leading English daily talked quite enthusiastically about this initiative. However, he expressed some concern on his first stopover, Dubai, in view of the line-up of plays that are part of the festival. 

I want to reassure him that Dubai is not only for spectacular Bollywood-type entertainment. There is a discerning audience for quality theatre as well. During my 20-year journey with the Khaleej Times, I took about 25 plays to Dubai. They were of different genres ranging from popular choices like Feroz Khan’s Tumhari Amrita, Rage Theatre’s I’m Not Bajirao, Bharat Dabholkar’s  Bottoms Up to serious plays like Nadira Babbar’s Begum Jaan, the one-woman play Sakubai and even a pathbreaking play called Kitchen Katha. We have covered all these in our previous columns.

Today let me fly back to Dubai one more time and take a look at one more theatre  memory — a truly pathbreaking play from Rage’s called Going Solo. 

Unlike Rage’s earlier productions like Love Letters and Class of 84, which were successfully staged in Dubai, this was a different kind of play. Going Solo was a collection of women’s monologues on surviving as a single woman in an urban environment — an aspiring actress, a lonely widow, a divorcee, a young girl who has just lost her mother, and a pregnant mother. Themes such as ambition, family conflict, male chauvinism, loneliness, survival and grief were explored with humour, pathos and poignancy.

Talking about the genesis of the play, Rahul D’Cunha of Rage says: “The idea was that three directors could get together to present three small plays over one evening — where all three could have 30 minutes each to present their work. So Vikram Kapadia, Anahita Oberoi and I sat down and discussed this idea. We came to the conclusion that monologue was the best format for such an evening. No one had really attempted monologues before, certainly not the three directors pooling their talent together like this. It was like the IPL of theatre. We were certainly a bit sceptical whether it would work. We also decided to try another first — the Broadway/West End approach of running the plays 21 days in a row. Mumbai was used to only weekend theatre so this was another risk. But on both counts our instinct worked. The plays were a huge success and ran to full houses”.

But I was in two minds whether Dubai audiences, who largely came to theatre to spend an entertaining evening with family and friends, will take to such a subject. My confidence grew when I read some of the reviews. “Allow me to stand, apply both palms one to the other and produce the curious rhythmic action ….. a standing ovation, people” — said a glowing-with-praise newspaper report. 

So the team flew in the three directors and the actresses Jayati Bhatia, Kitu Gidwani, Radhika Mittal, Zarina Mehta and Shernaz Patel and the packed Dubai audiences gave them a standing ovation. Going Solo started the trend for similar collection of 10-minute plays which resulted in the likes of One-On-One series.

I would like to end with Mark Zuckerbeg’s famous words “The biggest risk is not taking any risks. In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risk”.