Taking a break from serious themes, director Manoj Shah taps into humour.
When five actors are asked to hold together a play for two hours playing 38 characters, the director has to be either crazy or supremely talented. Though Manoj Shah, whose Laxmipoojan staged at the National Centre for the Performing Arts’ annual theatre festival Centrestage on Sunday is a bit of both. “I think the audience and destiny have been kind,” says the modest school dropout director, one of the most respected name in Gujarati theatre for over three decades who was talking to dna on the sidelines of a last-minute rehearsal.
Though this versatile director has brought plays of all kinds to the stage, he has made a name for himself with works like Apurva Avsar, Jal Jal Mar Patang, Siddh Hem, Vastupal Tejpal and Amar Phal which have something to offer both the heart and soul. “Gujarati audiences love attending spiritual discourses. No wonder my plays on Gujarati poets, saints and spiritual leaders get a huge response not only in small auditoria like Prithvi but bigger ones too.”
Why then has he chosen a comic version of Romeo & Juliet set against a contemporary background in Laxmipoojan? “Blame this on my troupe of actors who were tired of wearing period costumes. ‘Hamey yeh dhoti se bahar nikalo,’ they would plead,” he laughs and adds, “I guess I wanted a break from serious themes.”
Calling it “a celebration of the world of clichés we’re living in,” Shah explains: “We are influenced by TV, books or cinema right from the way we dress, eat to even the way we fall in love. Once you start looking at things from that perspective, you can see the humour in every situation. That’s what this play keeps tapping into.”
Playwright Uttam Gada remembers Shah’s briefs about using humour to look at the loss of an entire way of life with the loss of our own tongues due to inroads made by a homogenised, urbane, west-influenced, English-heavy language. “Sharp with his criticism and praise, he will wrest out the work in the shape he wants.” says Gada.
That’s where Ishan Doshi comes in. Having picked up finer aspects of stage-craft during his stint with UK-based theatre group, Complicita, 20-year-old Doshi (who began his innings at nine as child artiste with Shah), was entrusted with the responsibility to conduct a 22-day workshop with the cast. “I had to work with the language, mannerisms and physicalities to delineate and etch out each character as separate and unique.”
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