About The Event
A beautiful play written by Badal Sarkar was given to our team, our first project as Directors. It was an intimidating task to shrink the script into twenty minutes.
Akin to fitting a majestic elephant into a tiny anthill. We have made an effort to keep the essence of the playwright’s thoughts alive in our visual conceptualisation.
The interwoven love stories of the four men in this unusual surroundings of a cremation ground is unique and offbeat.
To overcome the challenge of the shortage of actors, we did a voice-over for the Ghost Girl, making it an even more daunting task for us, as well as the actors, because of the different time zones in the play, where the Ghost Girl appears as each man’s lost love. We have collapsed the time zones of the past onto the present moment and tried to depict them through short, crisp dialogues delivered with a jolt, music and play of lighting. Each man’s thoughts take him back to the time zone where he experiences the actual presence of his beloved and how he lost her .
The men are wearing a white cloth in the beginning, which denotes their expressionless lives like a blank white sheet of paper. There is also the casual act of playing cards, as if they are hiding some deep grief but have smiles on their faces, passing through life without self-realisation.
Gulping neat alcoholic drinks quickly brings out the pain. Finally, the bizarre surrounding, where a girl’s dead body is burning on the pyre, helps to unravel their deeply embedded thoughts. Thus, each one is able to expand on his memory and relive the few moments he had had with his beloved. In doing so, he is enlightened about his own passion and his soul lies bare. The red coloured cloth, encompassing him, is the visualisation for his love, passion, pain, violence, and deep agony of his lost love.
Tragic, oddly tender love stories in a crematorium. Badal Sarkar’s inception of the idea - bringing a little of “life” back to “death”, to spray a positive aura on a negative situation by saying- “zinda rehney sey sab kuch sambhav hai “ - is commendable.
Conceptualisation and compilation of this exceptional play was an extremely tough job, but we hope and pray that our humble effort rises to the expectations of our audience.
