Hello Farmaaish will always hold a special place in Yuki Ellias’ heart for several reasons. But the actor, director and playwright will also remember it for the rickshaw accident she had along with co-writer Sneh Sapru, the day they cracked the play’s plot! “We literally crawled out of the vehicle!” she recalls with a laugh. The second production to come out of the Aadyam stable, Hello Farmaaish has an interesting premise. It is a heartwarming tale of a group of village misfits trying to track down Kalpana Chawla’s space mission, while taking off on their own flight of imagination. While Yuki refuses to categorise it under a particular genre, she does come up with a few terms — “quirky, comic, poetic”.
SPACE VENTURES
Set in a fictitious village in the Aravalli Hills, it revolves around the concept of women-run community radio stations. “The story is set in 2003, around the time of Kalpana Chawla’s second flight to space. We have pre-dated the radio community time to that year, as there were a few people who had invented their own radio transmitters and were doing their own broadcast,” she elaborates. While Yuki has directed the play and co-written the story with Sneh — they have earlier collaborated on the award-winning play Elephant in The Room — the Hindi adaptation has been done by Vidit Tripathi. “Imagination meets science fiction and realism as after hearing about Kalpana’s space mission, some women from the village take over the local radio station in order to broadcast what they think of the concept of space. It’s a new experience for them to be on the radio, as big a journey as it is for the astronauts to venture into space,” adds Yuki.
GRAND SCALE
Yuki and Sneh spent quite a few months penning the script. And most of their research centered around community radio stations. “We went to Mewat in Haryana to observe a couple of them, spoke to a number of radio jockeys, and heard a lot of stories about their experiences. We saw that many of the community radio stations were interactive, with callers giving their feedback. It’s another world altogether,” she recalls. Once she and Sneh had the first draft down, they started working with Vidit to create the right kind of Hindi for their fictitious village.
The cast rehearses the play
Yuki is grateful that she has got Aadyam to back her production. “This is my third commissioned play and when you get a platform like Aadyam, it allows you to do much more. We have a big team, set designers, prop makers and a great studio space. You can try and work up to a scale instead of wondering what furniture you can use from your house for the props!” she laughs.
Produced by Dur Se Brothers Production, the cast of the play includes Abhishek Chauhan, Adithi Kalkunte, Amrita Bagchi, Puja Sarup, Vaishali Bisht and Priyanka Setia.
Hello Farmaaish will be staged today at 7.30 pm and tomorrow at 4 pm and 7.30 pm at Royal Opera House.
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