Absolutely terrorific

Divya Palat’s play on the November terror attacks in the city titled A Personal War has been nominated for two prestigious awards at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Among the total 35,000 shows at the event this year, the play has been singled out for nominations for the Amnesty International Best Play and the Fringe Review for Best Play. It has also been broadcasted live across radio and television by the BBC.

An ecstatic Divya says, “For every single show, we got a standing ovation. For the third show itself, we had a full house. People jostling for space in the aisles and the steps. A lot of people just stood, watching without a seat.” Interestingly, according to Divya (the director of the play), the play did extremely well with the native English. While the audience consisted of only 10 per cent Asians, the rest were all native Europeans, Americans and Australians.

Elfringe.com, the official website of the Fringe, has dedicated an entire section to reviews of the play with contributors spread across the continent. Interestingly, during the one-week run of the play, members of the audience took it upon themselves to distribute brochures and flyers in and around the festival. Divya recounts, “A lot of  competing theatre groups liked our play so much that some of them even started distributing our flyers around. The issue of global terrorism appealed to people across all sections.”

All this and more will feature in a video blog that Divya and her fellow thespians are putting up in the city along with a performance of the play. Divya says, “We have documented a lot of live footage from the event along with people commenting about their experiences after watching the play. In fact there is footage of a nine-year-old girl who composed a poem as an ode to our play.”

London calling

The play was especially quite popular among Londoners. According to Divya, a lot of people who were caught in the London bomb blasts were also present in the audience. For the time being, the group has been invited to London to do a full run of the play, for which the details are being sorted out.