Feisal Alkazi to showcase a double-bill of new productions in Bengaluru!

This January, well-known Delhi-based Ruchika Theatre Group makes its annual return to the city, bringing two brand new productions to Ranga Shankara. Veteran theatre stalwart Feisal Alkazi’s double-bill promises the premieres of Barbaad on January 2 and Jigsaw on January 3.

Opening with Barbaad — a powerful Hindi adaptation of Lynn Nottage’s acclaimed play Ruined, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2009 — Feisal adds an Indian context to the original play set in a small mining town in wartorn Democratic Republic of the Congo, transposing the narrative to the jungles of Chhattisgarh.

“Barbaad was a play I read over ten years ago and it stayed with me because of its immense power and feminist core. It is based on a play by Lynn Nottage, an AfricanAmerican playwright who wrote it after visiting Congo during the civil war, where women were the first victims and rape was used as a weapon of war. The violence created deeply complex realities, including children born of opposing sides of the conflict. The play gained international attention and was later taken up by the UN for its relevance in highlighting how women’s bodies are brutalised during war,” he tells us.

The story, although foreign, resonated deeply with the Indian context, particularly in Naxalite regions such as Chhattisgarh, where similar dynamics existed at the time he was conceptualising a play in his head. “Although it is rare for foreign playwrights to allow adaptations, Lynn — who is the only woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize twice for drama — was open to the idea. With the rights secured, we adapted the play to an Indian setting, situating it in a brothel deep in a forest within a Naxalite area, frequented by Naxalites, Indian security forces and local adivasi communities. That forms the core premise of the production,” he elucidates.

The brothel is run by a fierce, formidable woman called Bijli Bai, bijli meaning lightning in Hindi. The play opens with her and a man who visits her frequently; both are middle-aged, not romantically involved, but connected through work. He brings two young girls to be sold into prostitution and their backstory becomes the starting point from which the narrative unfolds. “Once the adaptation was complete, we did extensive movement work along with a striking set and costumes sourced directly from the pavements of Delhi — cheap saris, large flowers for the hair, loud make-up and the right kind of footwear,” he shares.

On an opposite yet bittersweet note, Jigsaw, a contemporary comedy drama, examines the lives of city dwellers through a series of interconnected vignettes — much like the pieces of a puzzle. It delves into the jigsaw of human emotions, focusing on how individuals navigate loneliness, ambition and the search for connection in an increasingly fragmented world. The plot follows a cantankerous Parsi man on his deathbed, who decides to settle his legacy in an unexpected manner. He enlists a female friend to track down the three adults who were conceived using his donated sperm decades earlier.

“Jigsaw began as an idea that stayed with me: what happens when a man who donated sperm thirty years earlier decides, as he is dying, that he wants to find the children born from it? I chose to make the central character a Parsi, partly because their funerary practices allow a certain eccentric freedom — there is no burial, the body is consigned to the vultures — and also because it is a disappearing community, now numbering barely 75,000 worldwide.”

The play follows three strangers — Larissa, Haritas and Shweta — who are now fully grown adults and offsprings of the Parsi man. They are brought together to piece their shared biological history while dealing with their own modern baggage. “We follow three children with very different life trajectories. The first is Larissa, a Catholic woman in her late thirties, whose complex and dramatic backstory unfolds in the opening scene. Set in Mussoorie, a hill station near Delhi, it explores the events surrounding her mother’s death and the loss of her younger brother, who was born through the same process,” he reveals.

The second is Shweta, a young college student from a Punjabi household — a Sardar father and an outspoken mother. She was conceived through sperm donation after her parents lost a child in infancy due to a genetic condition. Shweta is ambitious and preoccupied with dating apps, relationships and finding the ‘right’ kind of boyfriend. “The third is Harita, whose mother is still actively dating, adding yet another layer of complexity to her understanding of family, identity and inheritance,” he concludes.

₹250. January 2 & 3, 3.30 pm & 7.30 pm. At JP Nagar.

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