Play review: Sadarame is boisterous

Karnataka's Telugu-speaking Vaisyas came in for unbelievably devastating satire in Sadarame, the play that brought the curtains down on the Vodaphone Ranga Shankara theatre festival on Sunday.

The Kannada play, done in the company drama style of Gubbi Veeranna (1890-1953), tells the story of the charming Sadarame, daughter of greedy trader Bangaru Setty, and her adventures through a marriage and two subsequent suitors.

Spandana was perhaps best equipped to revive the play as its moving spirit B Jayashree is Veeranna's granddaughter and inheritor on his legacy. Trained at the National School of Drama, Jayashree had moved away from the costume drama of her grandfather's time to fashion a folk-inspired theatre idiom of her own. She must have been happy the theme of this year's Ranga Shankara festival company musicals gave her an opportunity to return to her roots.

The costumes (mid-20th century, Ravi Varma-inspired), the sets (painted backdrops, doorways with plastic flowers and creepers), choreography (black and white movie-inspired) and music (raga-based) harked back to a style of drama that had ended, at least in Bangalore, with the advent of modernist NSD-trained directors.

Bellave Narahari Sastry's (1881-1961) script is full of the most improbable situations (a king giving up his empire without a second thought, a prince being cheerfully married off a second time by a wife who has just risked her life to save him...). Its leaps of fantasy and defiance of logic leave you in a Chandamama-like thrall. The play owes much of its success to its rambunctious lampooning of the trader community. It's the old Chaplin formula strip, the rich of their gravitas, and you've got a hit on your hands! And just when you think Sadarame is taking the stingy Setty stereotype a bit too around and offers a feminist twist by portraying the community's women as smart, beautiful, and courageous, in contrast to the men, apparently crafty and rapacious, but daft actually. (Adimurthy is so dumb he says 'chatriya' for 'kshatriya' and 'vesya' for 'vysya'!).

B Jayashree usually steals the show in most of her productions, and here she played the thief and Sadarame's second suitor. Her rustic philosophizing, English-style singing and Chaplinesque dancing won her applause, but she had stiff competition from Dingri Nagaraj, who played the mean Adimurthy, the trader who bargains for and gets a kingdom in exchange for his sister's hand. With Srinivas Meshtru as his father Bangaru Setty, he brought the house down with some inspired clowning. Rohini Raghunandan as Sadarame and Amit Bhargav as prince Jayaveera handled the challenge of their singing roles with confident ease.

My one complaint was that the play got bogged down by slapstick excess, nd the situations became repetitive after the interval. Sadarame could definitely do with some sharp editing.

Much of the credit for the musical appeal of the play goes to Paramashivanna, who taught the troupe their songs, got them to rehearse for three months, and played the almost extinct leg-harmonium for the show.

It was heartening to see a star from the company drama era performing at a festival that had lots of young people in the audience.

Sadarame was made into a hit film in 1956, was recast as Miss Sadarame after the Gandhian theatre activist K V Subbanna rewrote it some five decades later. Going by the enthusiasm that greeted it at Ranga Sankara, this is one play that won't fade away in a hurry.