Yuki Ellias wrote her new play, The Far Post, when Ukraine and Russia had yet not gone to war. Three years later, the play is ready for its premiere, while the Ukraine war is still raging and a fresh conflict has opened in the Middle East.
“The Ukraine-Russia war started when we were preparing for the play’s rehearsal last year,” says Ellias, the Mumbai-based founder of Dur Se Brothers theatre company. “Now there is a war in the Middle East. Issues are not resolved and war between people continues leaving us to keep coming back to deal with the human conditions,” she adds.
The Far Post, Dur Se Brothers’ new production which premieres at the G5A Foundation for Contemporary Culture in Mumbai on November 22, tells the story of a postwoman delivering letters to both sides of a war. The Far Post joins such new productions as He-Rose by Puducheri-based Adishakti Laboratory for Theatre, Arts and Research and British playwright Henry Neylor’s Afghanistan Is Not Funny set for tours of Indian cities. He-Rose, which premiered in Lyon, France last September, is about the futility of war in the story of Arjuna and Achilles, the heroes of The Mahabharata and Homer’s Iliad, respectively. Afghanistan Is Not Funny re-enacts life in the war-torn South Asian nation two decades ago.
A Lepcha language production with English subtitles, The Far Post points towards truth and reconciliation of a conflict by employing traditional symbols of communities like mask, dance and puppetry. The play uses a mask made especially for the performance by Pierre Filliez, an acclaimed Switzerland-born maskmaker, along with puppetry and live Lepcha folk songs by the Gangtok band Sofiyum to explore war and peace. “Filliez sent me a mask during the pandemic,” says Ellias, whose previous productions include Hello Farmaaish on how life changes in a Maharashtra village after its residents learn about astronaut Kalpana Chawla’s space mission in 1987 and Basti Mein Masti a performance in alternative venues. Elephant In The Room, another of Dur Se Brother’s touring production, is a quirky reinterpretation of the mythological story of Lord Ganapati.
Produced by BNP Paribas with grants from G5A, The Far Post will see Sikkim’s Sofiyum band playing live music. “It is mostly a visual show and music will carry the story,” says Ellias about the 65-minute play that will travel from Mumbai to the inaugural Manam Theatre Festival in Hyderabad beginning on November 24. “I have been looking for a collaboration with Sufiyum for a long time,” says Ellias. “I went to Sikkim in February this year and met the band’s members. I didn’t have the full script ready at that time, but I told them the story of The Far Post. They liked it and created the songs when I completed the play,” she adds.
If Ellias collaborated with a folk band in Sikkim for The Far Post, Adishakti theatre joined Ensatt, a drama school in Lyon, France, for its new production, He-Rose, an artistic response to conflicts. “The play is a collaboration between Adishakti and Ensatt. It premiered in Lyon in September last year and will have a multi-city domestic tour early next year,” says Vinay Kumar, artistic director of Adishakti and director of He-Rose, which will have a multi-city tour of the country early next year.
Kochi-born playwright, actor and director Nimmy Raphael, who wrote the play, hyphenated the word heroes and even changed its spelling to spur the philosophy of inquiry. “I started writing He-Rose at the end of last year for the Adishakti-Ensatt project,” says Raphael, who also acted in the play that had five shows in Lyon in September last year. “The project was about Arjuna and Achilles and playing with our notions of heroes. I thought of breaking the word, heroes, because heroes have the potential to become something else,” adds Raphael, who acted in Mani Ratnam’s Ponniyin Selvan. “He-Rose is about who we are, who makes the decisions, who benefits and what is the role that women play in it,” she adds. “Most of the decisions that impact our lives are taken by people who sit far away from us. How do you justify the word hero is the exploration of the play.”
“Empathy comes from the fact that I understand what you go through. This can only happen through stories and that is our medium whether we are actor, painters or potters, different kinds of medium or different kinds of logic,” explains Raphael, who wrote and directed Adishakti’s recent production Bali, which explores the notion of right and wrong in the retelling of the various events that lead up to the battle between Bali and Lord Ram and eventually the death of Bali. “When we say heroes, we don’t see them at our level. To bring them to a human level in order to experience their conflict is the crux of the play. And their conflict is about becoming their true self to themselves.” Urmila, Adishakti’s 2023 production, also written and directed by Raphael, revolves around using sleep as a form of resistance in the story of the wife of Lakshmana from The Ramayana.
The British play, Afghanistan Is Not Funny, performed by award-winning playwright Naylor, takes off from a comedy project by him and English photographer Sam Maynard in Afghanistan two decades ago. Visiting Afghanistan in 2002 following the invasion of the country by US-led forces after the 9/11 terror attack on America, Neylor and Maynard ventured into the war zone experiencing the ferocity and futility of the conflict. A multiple award-winner at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Neylor narrates the story of their abduction by the Mujahideen, confrontation with war criminals and walking into minefields in the play, which is visiting India for the first time. Afghanistan Is Not Funny, which continues Neylor’s exploration of borders and resistance in such plays as the last year’s production Angel about a Kurdish female fighter and Borders (2019) set in war-torn Syria.
Across the country, theatre has seen a fierce return exploring subjects like war and peace in the aftermath of the pandemic at festivals by Mumbai’s Prithvi Theatre and G5A Foundation for Contemporary Culture, Delhi’s Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards, Bengaluru’s Ranga Shankara Performing Arts Theatre, International Theatre Festival of Kerala, Thrissur and many more in the growing alternative theatre space. Hyderabad’s new Manam Theatre Festival brings a fresh flavour to the diversity in arts in the historic city. “The idea is to bring people together,” explains Harika Vedula, curator of the festival that is scheduled to be held at multiple venues in Hyderabad between November 24 and December 17.
