A theatrical extravaganza

Shudrka Hyderabad, an amateur theatre group organised a programme titled ‘The Ballad of Death’ on Saturday at Lamakaan. The programme featured two plays ‘Ek Shaam Premchand Ke Naam’ and ‘Ek Soirachari Rajar Katha’ a play inspired by Albert Camus’ ‘Caligula’.

The first play tackled the topic as death is a daring raid that puts an end to the beauty in this world and the second represented death as a way of escape from this gloomy world which offers some sort of a relief.

The first play was an amalgamation of two of Premchand’s stories, ‘Kafan’ and ‘Sadgati’ and explored death in unlikely circumstances with unexpected twists and turns, all laced with the author’s humanist, equalitarian and socialist ideas.

In the second play, the motif of death is compared to resistance against contemporary despotism, holding out, love of the soil and collective voice that represents people’s hopes. In spite of restraining convention and law, the innately vicious autocratic tendency among rulers exists.

This enabled modern figures like Amin and Milosevic to indulge in ‘Caligula-ism’ – their dangerous whims and murderous eccentricities and it meant that the only remedy who terrorised, was assassination.

“We wanted to show these plays in a ‘Burra Katha’ art form. The actors in the play are working with me so many years and we did around 25 plays in Telugu, Hindi and Bengali till now,” said Swapan Mondal, director of the play.

Shudrka Hyderabad has been performing plays in Hindi, Bengali and Telugu since 2004. Some of their major productions are ‘Charandas Chor’, ‘Kinu Kahar Ka Thitr’, ‘Tukaram Ki Bekufi’, ‘Katha Andher Nagri Ki’ in Hindi, ‘Meemu Aatavikulam’ in Telugu and ‘Aajir’ in Bengali.