A creative, contextualized and simplistic script, combined with exquisite and sensitive narration, are universally sufficient to create a charming play.Does this play radically redefine the need for intricately designed costumes, elaborate settings, precisely engineered stage lightings and acoustics, stylized props, and more so a multitude of characters and memorized scripts, for bringing about a complete theatrical experience? "Tumhari Amrita", ever since its first staging in 1992, has triggered this inquiry in the intelligent audience.
Adapted from AR Gurney's Pulitzer Prize for Drama,this play, centered on epistolary form, has just two characters - Amrita and Zulfiqar - delicately portrayed by veteran actors Shabana Azmi and Farooq Sheikh. The play has been aptly contextualized to the historical and cultural settings of India by Screenwriter Javed Siddiqui and Director Feroz Abbas Khan. While the English play, directed by John Tillinger, has appeared with many pairs of prime-time and busy actors, the Indian version, staged more than 300 times over 18 years all over the world, has so far not seen a different pair. Even "Aapki Soniya", a sequel starring Sonali Bendre, first staged in 2004, was not as well received by the audience.
I have always had an inkling for dramas that not just amuse and entertain the audience, but unveil in the minds unique sensations of awareness and consciousness. Such dramas go beyond evoking instantaneous perceivable sensations of sight or hearing to breed imagination, both imitative and creative. Tumhari Amrita, even with its most simplistic form and aspect, brings about a perfect organic fusion of all these theatrical experiences. With the actors' beautiful voice modulations, even the most casual dialogues unfailingly begets vacillating emotions and moods. As they share the love and hopes, dreams and disappointments that have passed between them the play also subtly brings about the changing societal contexts in their separated lives. It also charmingly portrays the lost semblance of intimacy that once the letters and postcards could affirm.
All in all if this play has demonstrated anything, it has so that a creative, contextualized and simplistic script, combined with exquisite and sensitive narration, are universally sufficient to create a charming play - a play whose human appeal only grows with the passage of time!
