Lalit Gupta
JAMMU, Jan 16: Dogri play ‘Khede Khede Ch’, by Unison Cultural Troup, was staged as sixth production of ongoing annual theatre festival organized by Jammu and Kashmir Academy of Art, Culture and Languages, at Government College for Women auditorium, here today.
Written by late Parveen Kesar, a leftist dedicated to theatre, and directed by Vijay Malla, the play written as a collage was a kind of ideologue marked with progressive thinking that highlights the exploitation of the poor and marginalized sections such as the gullible villagers, farmers and laborers.
The play starts with a duo of folk theatre artists suddenly appearing in a village and enacting an impromptu performance that episodically enacts sequences starting from Shirin-Farhad to calamities like drought and excess rain that play havoc with lives of villagers and the exploitation that follows by politicians and money lenders which ultimately results into the murder of two protagonists.
The format of play befitting a ‘nukkad’, and performed by cast comprising of two-third green horn actors, was a weak production that suffered from miscuing of entries and exists, light fade-ins and fade-outs and most actors spewing dialogues with maximum lung power.
The unsuccessful effort to give the music and dance elements a Dogra context, jarring and longish background music pieces-all led to the dragging of a serious play and rendering it at as a farce.
The cast included Ajay Sahrma, Kuldeep Raj, Deepak Kumar, Atul Mehra, Arun Singh, Vikram Singh, Shallu Kumari, Gopal Verma, Kanta Sharma, Gopal Singh, Dr Vinod Sharma, Anuroop Pathania, Nisha Devi, Rafiq and Gaonwoo Walley.
Tomorrow Hindi translation by Ashok Grover and R L Tulli of William Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar and directed by Vijay Goswami, would be staged by ‘The Performers’.
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