Penned by Dutch playwright Ad de Bont, and translated into English by Marian Buijs, MIRAD....A BOY FROM BOSNIA, is a moving account of the refugees from the Bosnian Civil War of 1992-1995. They are coping with survival after having seen the worst. Though the play has as its central character a young boy Mirad , who has witnessed the war and lost both his father and his little sister to it, Ad de Bont skillfully hands over the narration to Mirad's Aunt Fazila and uncle Djuka, refugees themselves, who read out his letters and diary as well as relate events and incidents from the war. Ad de Bont's brilliant use of images, metaphors and the oblique point of view work beautifully to evoke empathy for the many characters who are collaged together in Fazila and Djuka's exchanges and the gory accounts of genocide, rape and torture.
The Pune based Mystique's presentation of the play upholds Ad de Bont's text in all its glory. DirectorDarshanNaik admits that he has adhered to the written text absolutely. A few dialogues are omitted here and there, but for most part the play is Ad de Bont's verbatim. No surprise then that it stirs up in the audience the same empathy, anxiety, and most importantly a willing suspension of disbelief as Fazila and Djuka travel from Sarajevo to Foca and Holland, sometimes in imagination and sometimes in space telling of the war's brutality, its turmoil, blood-shed, politics and its impact on civilians. Neha Mahajan (Fazila) and Saksham Kulkarni (Djuka), complement each other perfectly. While Neha keeps you engrossed with her magnetic eye signals, facial expressions and body language; Saksham astonishes with his variations in speech- he stammers in fear, sobs in pain, yells out in hatred, and trembles when quoting the little Mirad.Darshan Naik refrains from using graphic imagery and war sounds throughout the play, dwelling instead on dialogues and silence. Though it works in some scenes, the use of fervent elements in some of the others would perhaps garner a more attentive audience.Naik gives the text a whole new dimension however, by replacing Ad de Bont's positive ending which sees Fazila and Djuka as ready to restart, instead with an open-ending which closes on them, still narrating their version of the war.
This Pune based production recreates effectively Ad de Bont's themes of crisis, of hope, of us v/s them and of humanity v/s hate, written out in lines like:
"Don't pity him ,
Mirad will be alright .
He is young,
He has his whole life before him.
I'm more afraid for us.
How will we manage,
Can we start again?
Maybe we are tied to this hatred forever.
Where ever we are."
*Asma Ladha holds a Master's degree in English Literature and Applied Linguistics. She is an applied linguist, a freelance critic, a research student and a poet.
