World Theatre Day; Three-day festival kicks off in Jammu

Jammu: Three-day theatre festival to commemorate World Theatre Day kicked off at Natrang Studio Theatre, Kachi Chawni Jammu.

The festival started with the staging of the play ‘Tauba Tauba’. The play has been written by Rajinder Kumar Sharma and directed by Neeraj Kant. Coated with humor, the play presented some debatable issues that are faced by many theatre groups because of the lack of commitment of a few artists which spoiled the whole performance. But still, it was more inclined towards comedy than being didactic.

 The play opens at the home of one ‘Anokhe Lal’ who has converted it as rehearsal space as he is the director of the play which is scheduled to be staged within a few days. The drama erupts as the play proceeds and it appears that no one is serious about rehearsing other than the director. The artists who used to plead for a single entry in the play have turned pricy now and come up with different excuses to skip rehearsals. At the top of it, the newly appointed servant adds to the confusion as he comes up with a new problem every time he enters the room.

‘Anokhe Lal’ was very much worried about the performance of the play as nothing was going right, actors were forgetting the lines, people were coming late in the rehearsal, and on top of it, the tickets for the show had already been sold. The ultimate crisis occurs when the director comes to know that the actor who was doing the role of the father of the hero is not doing the play as he has to go out of the station for some personal work. Shattered by this untoward news, he decides to prepare his newly appointed servant to do the character of the father in the play, who reluctantly agrees but real trouble erupts when the real father of ‘Anokhe Lal’ arrives to whom the servant introduced himself as the father of ‘Anokhe Lal’ on which both the servant and Anokhe Lal received a thorough beating from the real father.

Natrang actors who performed in the play included Vishal Sharma, Aadesh Dhar, Kananpreet Kaur, Chaitanya Shekhar, and Sanket Bhagat. The lights of the play were executed by Neeraj Kant Sharma and the show was coordinated by Mohd. Yaseen.