Kathmandu:

The play Dhurva, which was performed at Gurukul on June 4, is based on the famous story of Dhurva tara. The play begins with a scene depicting the intimacy between the king and queen, then enters another girl with whom the king falls in love and leaves his queen. The story then moves forward where we see two young children playing with the king. While one is treated with the utmost love, the other is ridiculed by the new queen. The first being her child, the latter is the first queen’s son. This neglected child Dhurva, though consoled by his mother, is not ready to live like this and sets out on a journey of his own. And it is his journey and destination that the play portrays.

This play has a newness to it — be it the bold new opening with sexual connotations, a subject which is usually not seen in Nepali theatre, or the symbolic representations through body language without dialogues that form a major part of the play that moves the story forward.

The play has been prepared to be performed in Liverpool during the Contacting the World (CTW) festival to be held from July 27 to August 4. As a part of this programme, Aarohan from Nepal were partners with Die Zwiefachen from Germany.

“As they had chosen the story of the journey of Odysseus, we had to choose something similar. So we thought of doing this play based on Dhurva’s journey through Buddha’s perspective,” said director Pravin Khatiwada.

On the minimal use of dialogues, he said, “Personally I don’t like to make use of too many dialogues. And as we have to put up the play on an international arena and as people wouldn’t understand our language, we decided to use symbolic representations. We believe it will help anyone understand what we are trying to say.”

He added, “Even the use of body language in their plays is very rich and evident and it is something we have also tried to use.”

Besides being the journey of Dhurva, the play also entails in itself the present political situation of Nepal. “We have tried to show a mythical story incorporating politics in it,” explained Khatiwada.

The actors in the play are from the second batch of Aarohan — Ram Hari Dhakal, Pashupati Rai, Chiranjeevi Das Shrestha, Saraswati Chaudhary, Pramila Katwal, Nishansh Pokhrel and Pravin Khatiwada. The actors managed to give an interesting performance with good facial expressions. Another aspect that brought more life to the play was the the lighting by Raj Kumar Pudasaini and Khatiwada.

However, the few dialogues delivered especially by the female lead actors were in very low voices and one had to strain one’s ears to understand them. Be it the anger or the sadness, due to the soft voices they didn’t seem to generate the feelings quite effectively.