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'Take Me in Your Hands': NCPA Centrestage festival to feature play about books

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Dipika Roy and Vijay Crishna in 'Take Me In Your Hands'.
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This Friday, theatre-goers will get to see the work of well-known Slovenian playwright on an Indian stage. Banyan Tree Productions’ Take Me in Your Hands is an adaptation by Evald Flisar, the Slovenian novelist, short story writer and playwright.   “It is the first production done by a Slovenian in Mumbai, and in English,” says Dipika Roy, the director of the play. 

Take Me in Your Hands from Flisar’s Collected Plays II is set in a bookshop and is a story about two people sharing their ‘knowledge’ and learning from each other. It attempts to deconstruct the age old saying wisdom that’s brought on by age. “Take me…is a love story between two people who meet in a book shop. Books and the shop thus become a metaphor for their relationship to each other,” says Roy.   

The older gentleman Zac is from an old-world background. He is educated, sophisticated and has grown up surrounded by books. The younger woman Maya is worldlier and comes from an ordinary background. She is not well educated but hungry for knowledge. There’s a line in the play where she tells Zac, ‘There are things you take for granted’. 

Zac has a certain contempt for her quest for wisdom. He believes that reading is dangerous for somebody who may not understand them, and that people should have an introduction to books and not just be thrown into it. She, on the other hand thinks that books contain all the wisdom in the world. 

“It’s a bit of a dichotomy. They are two people who have fallen in love and are never able to say it because they are caught up in this search for themselves,” says Roy. “Books are dangerous because we are experiencing life in words. Reading isn’t different from being in love. There are so many hopes, so many different feelings and emotions attached.” 

The occasion for doing this play is because it is Flisar’s 70th birthday next year. Slovenia is celebrating this by having a Festival of Slovenian Drama in his honour. Banyan Tree Productions hopes to take the play there. Another important reason for doing the play happened to do with Roy’s thought about people losing interest in reading books. Initially they thought no one would connect to the play but as the days passed they realized that books are still ingrained in people. “There may be different ways of reading, through the use of technology, but the written word will always have resonance with people,” says Roy, who is also the co-founder of Banyan Tree Productions. 

Incidentally, the idea for the play happened at the NCPA. Roy met Flisar at a theatre festival there and they got talking. “I started reading up as much as I could about him. What I love about his plays is that they are universal and resonate with people because of their emphasis on personal values. They talk about clashes in belief systems, the characters are quirky and often seem to be fighting or lost causes,” she says. 

The characters of Zac and Maya will be essayed by Vijay Crishna and Roy.  

Take Me in Your Hands premieres at NCPA Centrestage Festival in Mumbai on Saturday, November 29. 

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