Popatpanchi play review , Marathi play review

	Direction : Shafat Khan Writer : Shafat Khan Cast : Mangesh Salvi, Parag Bedekar, Siddhesh Shelar, Rasika Agashe
Popatpanchi play review

Deepa Ranade	Host-A-Performance \| Schedules

Barring the folk theatre of Tamasha, Marathi theatre by and large has steered clear of lascivious themes. Taking immense pride in its pristine themes with intellectual thrust, Marathi plays are boastful of maintaining "high standards." But Shafat Khan's POPATPANCHI throws the rule book in the bin and re-invents the syntax of a modern Marathi comedy.

POPATPANCHI takes off with an item song. What with bar girls swinging to 'Munni badnam huee...' and their inebriated fans dancing along, it is pandemonium on stage and before you recover - the narrator swaggers in and cautions you to expect the unexpected. He warns you about the disjointed series of events that are about to unfurl before you. Sure enough, before you realize, you are sucked into the vortex of the bizarre tale of a don who has just married his lady love, Maina (Rasika Agashe) who used to be a bar dancer. Now on the run, he is forced to leave his bride alone at home.

The don is reluctant to let attractive Maina be left amongst his men and so he entrusts his spiritual Guru with her responsibility. But since Maina is contemptuous about god men and divine intervention of any sort, Guru has to appear before her in the guise of a story teller - Popat (Mangesh Salvi). Inspired by Shukbahattari, a time-honored folk novel, the parrot is the storyteller here who keeps Maina amused with naughty yet thought-provoking tales. Almost like Princess Scheherazade of Arabian Nights. But the roles are reversed here and Maina is not easy to please.

She sets some tough conditions before Popat that his stories "must be modern but not moralistic, amusing but not with a predictable 'they lived happily ever after.' They must have an 'easy and yet disjointed format.' Fearing for his life, Guru turned Popat starts weaving tales to keep Maina engaged.

He begins with the story of an honest cop who is in charge of the departmental sniffer bitch and is now facing an official enquiry for letting the bitch get impregnated! His wife thinks of sex unconsciously all the time and is far from happy with her physical appearance. She is keen to have her 'twin assets' enhanced with surgical intervention from Dr. Pyramidwala (indeed, pun intended). On the other hand the Police Commissioner heading the nefarious enquiry against the honest cop has a change of heart and decides to have a sex change operation from none other than Dr. Pyramidwala.

Outside of the story session, Maina is increasingly drawn to Popat but he has been neutered by the don in case that he gets tempted to bed Maina. So our clever Popat also approaches Dr. Pyramidwala to affix him the requisite, synthetic organ. This is where the imaginary realm overlaps the real life and the stories get entangled in a baffling yet thoroughly amusing manner. Most of the stories in the play are funny and witty on the surface but incisive and thought provoking at a deeper level. The tales are titillating as well as evocative but never crass or crude. And that is where this mature comedy scores.

The writer mocks the term "vulgarity" by using it repeatedly out of context, thereby trivializing its impact. But he gets bowed down by the onus of his innovativeness by unnecessarily including the episode of the sex change of the police commissioner and then taking it as far as getting him in the family way. This is the sole aberration in this otherwise free flowing farce.

Since the script is so multi-threaded, it required the writer to double up as the director to execute ideas in motion. Shafat Khan handles both the portfolios adeptly. As for the performers, Popat - Guru- Narrator is played effortlessly by young Mangesh Salvi, although Rasika Agashe is not exactly the bombshell. But yet she does a fair job of conveying Maina's sassiness. A special mention to Purnanad Wandhekar's spontaneous acts as the drunken Tirlya Sawant havaldar and ward boy Lingappa. Ajay Pujare's functional and multi-purpose set works well in this multi-track narrative. Rahul Ranade's music score adds to the fun element.

POPATPANCHI combines the western technique of Farce with the folk tradition of Tamasha, and the outcome is one joyride.

*Deepa Ranade is a film and theatre reviewer. She has been an entertainment journalist for over fifteen years.

read / post your comments

Discussion Board

Popatpanchi play review

Schedule