Kathmandu:

What would you do if a prop in your play was you or your co-actor?

That is what 16 actors from Germany’s Flying Fish Company brought to stage on September 22 with their play Home that they performed along with 14 artistes from the Aarohan Theatre Group, Nepal. Directed by Harald Fuhrmann, artistic director of The Flying Fish Company, this play derives from the actors’ personal experiences and is loosely based on their memories related to their homes, childhood or memories of war. There was no fixed stage as such and the actors’ daily attire were their costume. Without a script, the actors were free to improvise and make up a play as they went along.

The director has made various experimental artistic ventures and this was totally new for the Nepali audience. Some even asked, “Is this the real play or is it just a rehearsal?”

With no props, the actors attempted to get the idea across to the audience through movements and spoken descriptions. During the play, the actors acted the parts of doors, cupboards, tables and as the play was in the form of story telling, narration accompanied the action. The dialogues were delivered in a number of languages — German, English, Nepali and a made-up phoney language. Another interesting part of the play was the cross-gender casting with male characters playing female parts and vice-versa. With no fixed stage, the actors were free to roam around occasionally talking with the audience, thus breaking the sense of distance between the actors, the action on stage and the audience.

The audience accepted the fantastic realities they created on stage. The Flying Fish Theatre Company has come on an eight-month theatre journey to Asia (Nepal, India, Pakistan,) and will spend two months in Nepal. They stayed with Gurukul artistes, worked together with them and that was how personal stories came out for the performance. “You have a rich culture and tradition to draw stories from but because of World War II our past is bad,” says Fuhrmann adding, “If you live at a place and work there, you would be cooking the same soup, but if you travel around your horizon becomes wider. So we left our job and came on a tour of Asian countries.” The company will be staging performances in a number of venues here including a number of shools and theatres, telling stories about life in Europe to people from this part of the world, and hope to learn about life in Asia.