Director Vinay Sharma tells Yashna Shetty that his play, Ho Sakta Hai Do Aadmi Do Kursiyaan, is an exploration of stillness and silence, word and image, inscapes and instresses
Often an entire repertory is unable to hold an audience spellbound for a theatre performance. So what are the chances of one with two actors and two props achieving the result? Minimum, one would say but Ho Sakta Hai Do Aadmi Do Kursiyaan, written and directed by Vinay Sharma, promises to keep one hooked right till the end.
Using an ironic juxtaposition of humour with the tragic and the serious, Rikh and Padatik Theatre Group’s presentation uses two chairs and two actors to tell a number of stories through intense and inward performances. Zooming in on fragments from different individual lives, these apparently unconnected stories are linked by the emotions born of love, loss and absence. The chairs become a mercurial, ever-changing metaphor as the play intersects urban relationships and makes the implicit statement that we are given life to experience compassion and not to inflict violence. The underlying message is that those who do not recognise the fragility of life may succumb to either an inner decay or to a moment of rage which endangers society. The performance is an exploration of stillness and silence, word and image, inscapes and instresses and also an exposition of emotion in various shades.
So how did Vinay conceptualise the play? He says, “This play was performed first in 2005 at Padatik Little Theatre, Kolkata. It probably arose from a perception of an increasing fragmentation of a rapidly changing world. Speed and time were challenging relationships, values and ideals, hence the idea of two chairs as a metaphor of two men whose emotions react to this change. The genesis of the play also came from an inner need to go back to the basics, to the word as image, to the presence of the actor and a discarding of any other kind of support.”
The director goes on to add that performing a play with fewer actors and props is always harder as there is nothing to hide behind and no camouflage. He highlights, “As with any play, this one too required a rigorous process of understanding, analysing and seeking ways best suited to convey the overt and submerged feelings in words.”
So what does it take to transform a written play into a stage performance? He answers, “Blood, sweat and tears. Of course, experience and versatility can make it a little easier. And vision can make it exceptional.”
How does cinema and the advent of streaming platforms impact the theatre space? Vinay tells us that it does it in both a good and bad way. “On one hand it is reducing the attention span of the audience, on the other it is opening the audience up to more experimental work. Again, as always, theatre has always appropriated any new technology, any change, so the future is probably in a fluid and hybrid space where the digital and the live experience intersect in various forms.”
(Ho Sakta Hai Do Aadmi Do Kursiyaan is part of Saanjh, a two day theatre festival, organised by Atelier. The play is on July 19 and 20 at Akshara Theatre.The Curator of the festival is Kuljeet Singh and the festival manager is Mansi Grover)