Karl Marx In Kalbadevi
Revolution via Entertainment
What happens when Karl Marx returns from the dead and lands straight into the buzzing chaos of Kalbadevi, Mumbai’s most unapologetically capitalist neighbourhood? He is furious. Not just about capitalism running wild or billionaires launching rockets — but because people have twisted his words, misused his ideas, and turned ‘Marxist’ into a punchline. He wants to set the record straight. But Mumbai is not in the mood for lectures. So he adapts. He rants, he jokes, he dances Gangnam Style, he reviews a Gujarati thali at Bhagat Tarachand, he learns Gujarati because of his admiration for Mahatma Gandhi, and he tries to visit Mani Bhavan only to find the gates shut. Written by Uttam Gada and directed by Manoj Shah, this one-man play has been Ideas Unlimited’s calling card for over twelve years. Satchit Puranik — who looks the part with his wild hair, beard, and a tilak on his forehead — brings a manic energy to Marx that makes the philosopher feel less like a historical figure and more like your most opinionated uncle at a family wedding. The play premiered at the NCPA Vasant Gujarati Natya Utsav in 2013, has since been performed in Gujarati, Hindi, and Hinglish, and staged at Wilson College for the 150th anniversary of Das Kapital, at Aligarh Muslim University, and at JAINA conventions in the United States. As Time Out Mumbai’s Deepa Gahlot put it: the play is ‘enough to provoke the audience to go back thinking, this Karlbhai was one clever dude, eh?’
The People
Behind
the Play
Press &
Reviews
My Theatre Cafe (Keyur Seta)
Karl Marx in Kalbadevi — Revolution via Entertainment
A fine example of revolution through entertainment. You just can't keep your eyes off Satchit Puranik while he enacts different emotions with remarkable ease. The play deserves to be translated to other languages.
20 June 2013
Time Out Mumbai (Deepa Gahlot)
Karl Marx In Kalbadevi — This Karlbhai Was One Clever Dude
Manoj Shah embarked on an audacious production to deliver a sermon on socialism to incontrovertible capitalists with the mandate to make it entertaining. Enough to provoke the audience to go back thinking.
7 June 2013
Mumbai Theatre Guide (Deepa Punjani)
Karl Marx In Kalbadevi — Review
A title like Karl Marx In Kalbadevi is enticing, full of prospects. Satchit Puranik ably enacts this one-person play at breakneck tempo. I would dare these mavericks to be more risky and provoking.
15 March 2013
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Hu Chandrakant Bakshi
I, Chandrakant Bakshi
The story of Gujarati literature's most controversial writer, told by the man himself — or rather, by Pratik Gandhi inhabiting him with a ferocity that made audiences forget they were watching an actor. Chandrakant Bakshi (1932–2006) authored 178 books, served as Professor of History, became Sheriff of Mumbai, got his short story 'Kutti' banned by the Gujarat government, publicly defied Bal Thackeray and refused to apologise, and wrote an autobiography so incendiary that parts of it could not be published. His writing style — Gujarati laced with Urdu, Hindi, and English — was as deliberately provocative as his public persona. He was, by every account, an incredible egoist. He was also, by every account, adored by his readers. Written by Shishir Ramavat and drawn from Bakshi's autobiography Bakshinama, the play premiered on 15 June 2013 at Prithvi Theatre. Manoj Shah uses a ladder throughout the production as a metaphor for Bakshi's obsession with being on top. Gandhi — years before Scam 1992 would make him a household name — delivers what CreativeYatra called a 'cautious yet fearless' performance, bringing the bold and egotist protagonist to 'flawless perfection.' This play, along with Mohan No Masalo two years later, is credited with solidifying Pratik Gandhi's reputation as an actor of immense talent.
Master Madam
Neither Religion Nor Prostitution
Master Madam is Bhagavadajjukam — a Sanskrit farce roughly 1,600 years old, traditionally attributed to a playwright called Bodhayana about whom nothing else is known, and the oldest surviving comedy in the Indian repertoire. Manoj Shah staged it in Gujarati for the Prithvi Theatre Festival 2013, whose theme that year was world classics. The plot turns on a body swap, which makes this very likely the first body-swap comedy ever written — centuries ahead of Ovid, Shakespeare or Kafka. A sadhu has practised yoga to the point where he believes his soul can leave a body and enter another at will. A ganika — a courtesan — believes her body can get her anything she wants. Yamraj, working through the day's quota of souls to collect, makes a clerical error: he lifts the courtesan Vasantsena instead of her friend, and gets a dressing-down from Chitragupta for it. Meanwhile the sadhu's exasperating assistant Shandilya dares him to prove his powers by bringing the dead woman back, so the sadhu moves his own soul into her body. Yamraj returns to correct the mistake, finds Vasantsena's body already occupied, and drops her soul into the sadhu instead. Two people are now living in the wrong bodies, and neither can stop being who they were. Ideas Unlimited played it as a farce that keeps its philosophy. Yamraj argues in colloquial Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi and English; Shandilya is a devotee of one Swami Rajnikanteshwar and wants nothing to do with his master's discipline; a line of disciples in white shawls chants behind them. The stage is close to bare — Kabir Thakore's painted backdrop of a tree, Kanhaiya's score, and Shekhar Phadke's lighting dividing the floor into zones, with Akash Naik's choreography moving bodies through them. Reviewing it for MumbaiTheatreGuide, Pratik Kothari singled out the climax, where the two souls and two bodies move back towards equilibrium — the ascetic who is all control, the courtesan whose work is to satisfy desire — and called the presentation of that transformation deserving of applause. The poster put the play's proposition in one line: you can't call it religion, and you can't call it prostitution, so better call it Master Madam. It runs 120 minutes with an interval and carries an advisory of sixteen and above. In Kerala, where Bhagavadajjukam survived inside the Kutiyattam repertoire, the full ritual performance of the same story once took more than a month.
What's Up?
One Man, One Flight, Too Many Calls
Meet Chirag — a perfectly average man in his early thirties with a single, noble mission: catch a flight to Chicago and save his not-so-bright brother from being thrown behind bars for a minor misunderstanding. But before he can zip up his suitcase, his girlfriend drops a bombshell. His phone starts ringing like it owes someone money. On the other end: his sister’s in-laws, an elite task force of relentless, nitpicking, drama-fuelled wedding planners who believe that unless Chirag approves the saree border and the sambharo menu, the marriage might as well be cancelled. From that moment, Chirag’s day turns into a high-stakes obstacle course complete with passive-aggressive aunties, conspiracy theories on family WhatsApp groups, emotional blackmail disguised as wedding prep, and the looming threat of missing his flight. He’s stuck between love and loyalty, Google Maps and Google Calendar, chai breaks and breakdowns. Written by Uttam Gada and directed by Manoj Shah, What’s Up? is a riotous solo comedy performed by Chirag Vohra — the original lead of Master Phoolmani. It premiered at NCPA’s CentreStage Festival in November 2015 and perfectly captures the madness of trying to keep everyone happy when no one knows what they actually want.
Gathariya
Kaleidoscope
Chandravadan Chimanlal Mehta — Chan. Chi. Mehta to everyone who read him — spent his life packing and unpacking. He was born in Surat in 1901, schooled in Vadodara and Surat, wrote more than twenty-five plays including Agagadi, joined Gandhi at the Bardoli Satyagraha in 1928, taught at New Era High School in Bombay, went into All India Radio in 1938 and ran its Ahmedabad station, started the first diploma and degree courses in theatre in India at M. S. University in Baroda, and travelled — Europe, America, theatre after theatre — until the travelling became the writing. The twelve volumes he made of it are all called Gathariyan: bundles, the cloth-tied bedroll a traveller slings over one shoulder. Bandh Gathariyan. Chhod Gathariyan. Safar Gathariyan. Natya Gathariyan, the one on theatre, took the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1971. Manoj Shah's play takes the title and the image literally. Pulkit Solanki plays Mehta alone on a bare stage with two bundles: one stitched out of patchwork the height of a man, one painted as a map of the world. He unties them and the life comes out of them in no particular order — a doll made for a child, a name given, the first day of school and the first punishment in it, a marriage he did not want, a train to Surat, Uttarayan kites over the roofs, Bardoli, a film projector, the Ila poems that move without warning between nursery rhyme and elegy, Vande Mataram, Bach's St Matthew Passion, New York jazz, and the long way home. Kanti Patel wrote it; Satya Mehta made the dramatisation; Kanhaiya's fifty-two-cue score carries the century the way the bundles carry the luggage. The play is subtitled Kaleidoscope, and it earns the word. There is no chronology to hold on to and no second actor to play against — only a man, his luggage, and Shekhar Phadke's light finding him in it. What holds is the voice: the appetite of a man who wanted to see every stage on earth and then tell Gujarat about it in Gujarati. It premiered at the Godrej Dance Theatre at the NCPA, Mumbai, at four in the afternoon on 27 March 2016 — World Theatre Day, the observance Mehta's own record says he moved the resolution for at the International Theatre Institute's congress in Vienna, under UNESCO. It later played Prithvi Theatre, Juhu.
Pai Pai
A Play for Ages 6 to 106
A pai was the smallest coin India ever minted — so small that the phrase pai pai came to mean every last fraction of what you own. Dhiruben Patel's play hangs one from a fishing line and lets a houseful of teenagers try to catch it. They are convinced their parents don't give them enough money. So they set out to earn some themselves, by every innovative scheme a group of school friends can dream up, and one after another the schemes fail. What arrives at the end is not a windfall but an understanding: of what it actually took their parents to build the comfortable home they had been taking for granted, and of how much of it was never about money at all. The play looks straight at the craze for money in the world these children are growing into, and does it as farce — a joke at the expense of everyone in the room, adults included. Written by Dhiruben Patel — novelist, playwright, editor of Sudha, president of the Gujarati Sahitya Parishad, and winner of the Ranjitram Suvarna Chandrak and the Sahitya Akademi Award — and directed by Manoj Shah, who also plays in it. Riddhi Vora, Durgesh Rajput, Maulik Shah, Prakash Waghela, Prashant Savalia, Nimesh Shinde and Rushikesh Chandaran complete the company, on a set that is a teenager's living room down to the pop-star posters on the wall. The poster puts the argument in one image: a 1945 one-pice coin with a hole through the middle, dangling on a line cast from a moon shaped like a pie. Two hours with an interval, and, as the Gujarati poster says, for children aged six to a hundred and six.
Bhav Prapanch
The Soul's Journey Through Worldly Illusion
Based on the Upamitibhavaprapancha Katha by Siddharshi Gani — a 10th-century Sanskrit text that Hermann Jacobi called the first allegorical novel in Indian literature, predating Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress by seven centuries. The play follows Dramak, an ordinary soul trapped in the city of Adrishyamool Paryant — a place that stands for the world as we know it, governed by greed, attachment, illusion, and desire. Dramak lives a bestial existence, wasting his time in futile efforts to preserve his meagre possessions. Caught in the bonds of attachment and illusion, believing the worldly illusion around him to be truth, he accumulates infinite karma and moves further from liberation with each birth and death. But there exists a Maharaja's royal temple — maintained with skill and devotion by servants who guide souls toward spiritual liberation through dharma, renunciation, compassion, and mercy. Their hands are always extended. The question is whether Dramak will take hold. The concept was distilled from Siddharshi's 16,000-verse original by Dr. Jitendra B. Shah, Director of the L.D. Institute of Indology, and dramatised by Prathang Dave and Raju Dave. Kabir Thakore designed the sets and Kanhaiya composed the music. The tagline reads: the end of sorrow is the beginning of peaceful happiness.