Naughty at eighty

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You must have seen many adaptations of plays written by that great master of comedy, Molière. But when was the last you watched an indigenous production that evoked the familiar milieu of Molière’s characters? Mumbai-based Rangbaaz Group brings alive Molière’s flavour in Bade Miyan Deewane, a play based on India-born Pakistani novelist and playwright Shaukat Thanvi’s Budbhas (1936).
Directed by Imran Rasheed, who plays the role of Mir Sahab, Bade Miyan Deewane — featuring Divya Sharda, Shivani Tanksale, Abir Abrar, Pawan Uttam, Saurabh Nayyar, Nishi Doshi, Sanjay Dadhich, Farrukh Seyer and Amit — will be staged at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi today.
The play, bristling with slapstick humour, is a hilarious, roller-coaster ride through the colourful indulgences, affairs and advances of Mir Sahab, an eccentric octogenarian who falls for his neighbour Sheikh Inaayatullah’s teenage daughter named Suraiya, whom his son, Tabish, also fancies and plans to wed.
In the comedy of eccentricities and errors that unfolds, Sheikh wants to get his daughter married to a writer named Shaukat, a well-wisher of Mir Sahab, who keeps telling the latter to leave his waywardness (read frittering away his resources on tawaifs like Heera and Gulab) and get back to the “good old days”.
Shaukat, the good writer, is caught in a bad situation as both Mir Sahab and Sheikh Sahab want him to do different things: While the former wants him to convince Sheikh that he is a great prospect for Suraiya, the latter wants him to “counter Mir Sah-ab’s advances and teach him a lesson”. This leads to some colossus quandary and confusion, enviousness and spite. The result: A laugh riot.
Talking over the phone from Mumbai, Rasheed, who has worked with theatre veterans like Nadira Babbar and Naseeruddin Shah and holds them in high stead, said that the play’s larger point was that old age was essentially “mental illness” and that love has nothing to do with age. “One can stay young till one’s last days as Mir Sahab does,” says Rasheed.
Rasheed holds that while Molière, Brecht and Shakespeare have spawned a million productions the works of some of India’s finest playwrights remain in relative obscurity as theatrepersons have by and large left them untouched. Shaukat Thanvi is one of them. After this play, Rasheed — who has earlier directed Roshnai ka Safar that revisited the life and times of our best-known writers, both classic and contemporary — plans to make a tele serial on Thanvi. Next on Rasheed’s list is: Patras Bukhari, another Urdu writer who gave a fresh lease of life to humour writing in the language.
To Rasheed, who seamlessly straddles between acting and direction, it all comes quite naturally. “They are connected with your soul. If you are a good writer, you will naturally be a good director and actor,” he says. Rasheed terms Naseer saab as a “scientist” of theatre. “He invents emotions,” says Rasheed of his model who has changed the direction and purpose of his life.
As he makes theatre his calling, Rasheed is raring to reinvent and redefine the contours of Hindi theatre by reclaiming the rich reservoir of our theatrical heritage as well as scripting his own stories that are almost sureshot to strike a chord with theatrebuffs. Bade Miyan Deewane, if anything, is only a glimpse of his vaulting ambition.