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Girish
Karnad's play
Bali
(Sacrifice)
By
Subroto Mukherjee
GlobalomNet
Media Service
Naseeruddin Shah |
Ratna
Pathak Shah |
Naseeruddin
Shah will star in a new play by Girish Karnad that goes on stage in
Leicester in Britain next month.
The play Bali - The Sacrifice, will run at the Leicester Haymarket
Theatre from May 31 to June 15. The play is being staged in Leicester,
about 100 miles north of London, under a previous contract.
The play is set to get packed audiences. Karnad's play has been long
awaited on the theatre scene in Britain.
Naseeruddin Shah is also going to be a crowd puller after the great
success of Monsoon Wedding in cinema halls across the UK.
The play also stars Ratna Pathak, Gary Turner who starred in Emmerdale
and Neve Taylor. The play was commissioned by Leicester-based Dr Vayu
Naidu for the Haymarket Theatre which is known to stage bold new
productions.
The play is based on a Jain epic by Somadeva Suri written 11 centuries
ago. The play begins with the sound of a beautiful song floating through
the air in a ruined temple one dark night. It’s the voice of a mahout,
an elephant keeper.
The voice draws the queen from her bed. The king wakes, and follows her
silently. What he sees in the temple makes his blood run cold.
The king is torn between an impulse to violent action to resolve a
situation and to deal with his feelings of anger and betrayal, and a
belief that a life of non-violence is the only worthy life to be lived.
The myth is ancient, but Girish Karnad has adapted it to project the
dilemmas of our own times.
Girish Karnad has been working on the play since he took over as
director of the Nehru Centre in London two years ago. Girish Karnad says
he took up the London job “partly hoping it will give me more time to
write,” he was quoted in an interview sometime back..
“Here my weekends are my own, all of two and a half days,” says
Karnad. “In India I was involved in a lot of work in TV and film
production, and that always spills over into the weekends.”
The play is the passion for Karnad. “I’d gone into films mainly for
money, because you can make a lot of money in films. Now my children are
grown up, I’m not that desperate, and I can take it easy.”
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