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Girish Karnad's English play, 'Boiled Beans On Toast', offers a contemporary view of a city
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Girish Karnad, fresh off a year in which his 75th birthday was celebrated as a national event of sorts, remains as relevant as ever. When he is not shoring up maverick credentials with his frequent run-ins with the mandarins at large (on matters ranging from his broadsiding of writer V.S. Naipaul for his “antipathy to Muslims", to his dismissal of Rabindranath Tagore’s limited oeuvre as a playwright), his plays continue to enjoy successful runs in a theatre climate in which art patronage is down to a trickle.
The playwright’s later work—colourful, revealing, contemporary tales, with their tongues firmly in cheek—has marked a departure from the austerity of his early plays, seeped in Indian mythology and history, that firmly ensconced him as one of India’s most significant playwrights. Now, director Lillete Dubey will stage his new play, Boiled Beans On Toast, for Mumbai audiences.
Interestingly, the publicity material for this new production features blurbs from noted theatre critic Shanta Gokhale’s rave of an earlier Marathi version of the play as well as her foreword to the Oxford University Press’ English edition that was released earlier this year. In its original Kannada version, titled Benda Kaalu On Toast, the play has been made available by Dharwad-based publishing house Manohara Granthamala—the covers of both editions adorned with a sprawling canvas of a swarming city illustrated by the late Mario de Miranda. The title itself is a play on Bendakaalooru, an early name for Bangalore according to lore.
In what is a lively social commentary, the city is a live backdrop to a household in flux, where the interior worlds of players are constantly at odds with an ecosystem that seems cobbled together by their own choices and attitudes.
Pradeep Vaidya’s Marathi translation was produced last year by the Aasakta theatre group as Uney Pure Shahar Ek, in which Pune stood in for the original’s Bangalore, a transposing that successfully localized the play’s milieu while retaining its fundamental essence. The rootedness of an Aasakta venture and its minimalist design perhaps stand in some contrast to the “big ticket" theatre of Dubey’s Primetime Theatre Company.
In her plays, Dubey evokes worlds that are characterized by an urbane refinement with no trace of ostentation perhaps, but which are still insulated from the minutiae of entrenched middle-class living—the very building blocks of a playwright’s intimate and bitingly observational world. Her no-nonsense sincerity of approach to faithfully representing a play has led her to this second telling of a Karnad play, the
first being Wedding Album, a sardonic (if slight) take on the great Indian marriage institution.
There are inherent class conflicts in the play, a constant navigation of an increasingly sapping urban terrain, and perhaps, a grappling with still inchoate notions of egalitarianism. Karnad’s working-class characters are certainly not bit players, they prop up whole narratives in this microcosm.
In Boiled Beans On Toast, Dubey is reunited with Joy Sengupta, whose outings with her have included the long-running Dance Like a Man (500 shows and counting) and Sammy, in which he played a strapping Mahatma Gandhi.
Boiled Beans On Toast will open on 20 April, 7-9pm, at Tata Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), NCPA Marg, Nariman Point. Tickets, ₹ 360, ₹ 500, ₹ 760, ₹ 1,000 and ₹ 1,500, available on in.bookmyshow.com
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