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Theatre &Television Associates-Delhi- presented ERENDIRA by Amal Allana’s theatre company during the 11th National Theatre Festival organised by the Nehru Centre. It was a much-awaited event. ERENDIRA’S performance took place after NATI BINODINI and had the same ensemble of actors.
Erendira is a fictitious character who endures perennial pain and suffering perpetuated by the devilish greed of her grandmother. While there is no obvious comparison of the play with NATI BINODINI, the pivotal character in both the plays is a woman. And it is this common factor that leads to the analogous approach to both the productions in terms of the visual treatment of the events and of the multifarious impact they have on the particular character.
ERENDIRA is a dramatisation of Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short story titled ‘Erendira and her heartless Grandmother’. Actually this simple title conveys the whole story. Amal Allana and Salima Raza in their joint dramatisation of the story have tried to capture and project the abuse of women at a universal level.
The script is a fairytale like story of a beautiful, young, timid girl and her witch like grandmother. Venerable Erendira has youth and charm. Her grandmother has an unquenchable greed and has total controls over her grand-daughter. Their very different natures collide constantly. As per the story, Erendira’s unmindful act destroys their ancestral house. With that loss, the old woman’s greed takes on demonic proportions. She puts the little girl through horrifying sexual abuses and in her travels, sells Erendira’s body to gratify the lust of men.
At last Erendira finds love and she wishes to rid herself of the clutches of her grandmother. She asks her lover to kill the old woman and thus prove his love. After the first aborted effort, he accomplishes the task and when he returns to Erendira, she has left him to travel alone to the dream destination of the sea that they both dreamt together of.
It’s a strange story with an enigmatic end and this is probably the uniqueness of Marquez’s creative genius.
Director Amal Allana has created a magical ambience to project the simple story. The surreal set by Nissar Allana, and Amal’s costume design provide an aesthetic extension to the set and add fluidity to the presentation. The music and the choreography together make the theme come alive. The story has violence, brutality, sexuality and vulgarity that could have been impossible to project realistically.
And that may be the reason why the staging is elevated to the planes of a carnival and a mass ritual of the man-woman union- by force or desire- without offending the audiences’ sensibility. The ambience is reflective of tantric Rituals that have a dynamic life force. The erotic scenes remind one of miniature paintings from different schools. The light design by Nissar Allana magnifies the impact of the actions to great extent.
The device to use the same actor in a multiplicity of roles is perhaps to project the impact on the gender and class of the aggrieved and at the same time creates interesting visuals while setting the play at a racing pace. The projection of a woman’s multiple images on stage however worked better in NATI BINODINI. Erendira’s character takes shape using this device but disintegrates just as immediately in a maze of technical extravaganza.
The foremost impression of the play after the show was on a sensory level. The poignant pathos of the story was somehow pushed into the background. Undoubtedly both ERENDIRA and NATI BINODINI will be remembered because of the excellent theatre techniques employed and their scale in terms of production values can be compared with Tim Supple’s recent production of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM.
*The writer is a senior theatre and television person who has trained under Ebrahim Alkazi at the National School of Drama (NSD). She has written for publications such as ‘The Asian Age’ and is a regular contributor to the Prithvi Theatre Newsletter (PT Notes). She also offers theatre training to students at the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan and is an important critical voice for the Gujarati Theatre.
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