Drama revolves around farm laws, fight for an abandoned child: Xpressions theatre fest

HYDERABAD: Xpressions group kickstarted its three-day multi lingual theatre festival here on Friday.

Reenacting the Caucasian Chalk Circles of Bertolt Brecht, Shudrka theatre group enacted a play,

“Oka Anokha Roopkatha chalk circle”.

The Department of Culture of Telangana Government sponsored the event.

This drama is an adaptation of Caucasian chalk circle. “We did it in four languages in Telugu, Hindi, Bengali and English.

Since we are doing a multilingual festival, the idea is that theatrical representation breaks the language barrier we have.

It should not create a barrier between people. Uplifting the diversity and amity. Celebrating, accepting and uplifting the diversity and finding the unity in it is the core idea. End of the day we are one even though we look different and speak different languages. Theatre has the ability to blur out these barriers and feel the oneness of celebration of humanity,” according to Sauravi Ray, lead actress in the play.

The theme revolves around the farmers movement. It’s an agitation platform. Theatre people also joined them as agriculture represents culture, greenery, fertility, celebration and unity, she says.

There are certain news coming in about government forces going to crush the same. “We are there to fight it out. We will show the authorities who came for negotiations,” she says.

The play starts with the story of subedar Agni Pratap Singh. It is a turbulent time - a war was going on. He was controlling the domain and sucking up the common man’s resources. The first scene opens with that.

Subedar gets killed by his compatriot. Subedar has a child. His wife leaves the child and flees, as material things were important to her than the child.

There is a maid by name Suma and she picks up the child and passes through ordeals to raise the child. It’s her journey that is depicted.

Finally, suma and subedarini fight a case over the ownership of the child as the kid is having the property on her name.

Suma doesn’t have any property and she doesn’t want any.

She is fighting for the ownership of the child as her well-being was important.

The court rules in favour of Suma.

The prologue says that the Farm laws were withdrawn.

“We are the travellers towards light. This is not the time for celebration and we have to move farther,” Ray explains.

This play has all the four languages used in it. The villain speaks Telugu. Suma and her lover Suman speak Telugu. Subedarini speaks English and the others speak Hindi. The chorus character speaks Telugu and Hindi. The Judge. character, Mushtaq, speaks all the languages.

Bengali songs were used to dot the play that enthralled the audience for two hours.

Sauravi Ray donned three roles in the play — Subedarini, Suma’s mother-in-law, and a village woman.

Suma leaves the child at the doorstep of some villager.

When the woman of the housesees the child she’s scared and then decides to raise the child. She was willing to take the trouble to rear rather than leaving her to her fate.

Suma reaches her brother’s home where she was unwelcome. The brother wants to give off Suma in marriage against her wishes. The boy’s aunt is a cantankerous character and wheeler dealer.

She needs to do whatever she needs to. So she manages to pull it through. Marriage happens and Suma stays in marriage. When the police take the child with them, Suma fights for the child in the court.

The Court scene handles three cases in the play. And, it’s curtains drawn.

Shudrka Hyderabad Shilpitirtha Trust, a theatre group based out of Hyderabad, has been

performing plays in Hindi, Bangla and Telugu since 2004. It wishes to play its part in honouring and developing the culture of people of India and intends to research, explore and develop new ways of working in theatre. The group is proud to continue its 20 + years of tradition of contributing to the culture of India and to the enrichment of the national

theatre community.

Shudrka Hyderabad educates the youth with respect to significant social issues, provides

training to emerging young artists, and experiments with new forms of theatrical

presentation. Its vision is to transform society through theatre. In order to do that, it works

with a lot of young men and women with a goal to promote and reflect diversity. It tries

to make theatre accessible to everyone, both by telling stories not told in the mainstream

and by keeping the work affordable.

XPRESSION” is being celebrated from March 29-31, 2024 at Ravindra Bharathi, in

Hyderabad.

During the three-days of festivities, five plays from five regions of India

including Telangana will be presented as a celebration of cultural diversity. Bringing

together professional artists and university students, the festival will place an emphasis on

instructive interaction, featuring two creative workshops led by guest artists and

performers, an inaugural lecture and one critical discussion that will offer in depth analyses

of the plays by and techniques of Bertolt Brecht to celebrate the completion of his 125th

birth year.