The Plays

Adhe Adhure | March 3, 2012, 7:30 pm

Nominated for: Best Play, Best Director, Best Actor in a Leading Role (Male), Best Actor In A Leading Role (Female), Best Supporting Actor (Female), Best Stage Design, Best Lighting Director

Produced by: Prime Time Theatre

Directed By: Lillete Dubey

Language: Hindi

Duration: 2hrs

Savitri a middle aged woman, is dissatisfied with her circumstances; an unhappily married daughter, a promiscuous teenage girl, an unemployed son and above all a husband who has failed to provide her emotional and financial security. She seeks to fulfill herself in relationships outside marriage, only to realize that men are the same beneath different faces. A powerful and searingly truthful look at marriage, the play explores the themes of fragmentation and incompleteness at the individual, familial and social levels. What makes Mohan Rakesh’s portrait of Savitri so gripping, is that one is never sure whether he admires her rage to get a grip on her life, or whether he suggests that she is a woman caught in her destiny and circumstances in the manner of a tragic Greek heroine.

Directors Note
It was the summer of 1972 and I was watching my first Hindi play. The play was Adhe Adhure and the place was the Studio Theatre at the National School of Drama...and I was transfixed.

I had never before seen anything like it. A play that married from and content in equal measure…that examined relationships and the minute of our everyday lives in a language that was at once heartbreakingly poetic and gut wrenchingly powerful, with characters that were as real as your own family and female protagonist whose complexities were as rich as they were familiar… here was a play that tore at the heart of the middle class with the precision of a surgeon.

Lillete Dubey Best Director, Best Actor In A Leading Role (Female), Best Stage Design
Lillete Dubey is a theatre director as well as a stage, television and film actor. She is also the artistic director of her own theatre company, the Mumbai-based Primetime Theatre Company. The company was set up 20 years to promote and provide a platform for Indian playwrights. The company has won several awards for its work and has travelled across India as well as the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and the Middle East. Adhe Adhure is her 25th production. As an actress, Lillete Dubey has played the lead in more than 60 stage productions ranging from Greek tragedies and absurd dramas to Shakespeare and works by Indian playwrights.

Mohan Agashe Best Actor in a Leading Role (Male)
Mohan Agashe has worked on the stage and screen for nearly four decades. A trained psychiatrist by profession, he continues to work as a professor in Pune. Mohan Agashe began his illustrious career with an acting tour-de-force as the Machiavellian Nana Phadnavis in Vijay Tendulkar’s internationally acclaimed play Ghashiram Kotwal and went on to work with acclaimed directors such as Satyajit Ray,Mira Nair, Shyam Benegal, Gautam Ghose and Jabbar Patel in a succession of plays and films.

Ira Dubey Best Supporting Actor (Female)
Ira Dubey majored in theatre studies at Yale University. Actively involved in performance since the age of six, she acted in over a dozen plays with the Delhi-based children’s theatre group ‘Kids’ World’. At Yale, she trained in speech and movement development, Shakespeare and the Michael Chekhov acting technique. She also performed in over ten productions there, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, The House of Bernarda Alba and Beckett’s Shorts. Her theatrical work includes Womanly Voices, 30 Days in September; The President is Coming and The Maids.

Bhola Sharma Best Stage Design
Bhola Sharma has been involved in art direction, set and lighting design since 1982. He has worked with several theatre directors including Naseeruddin Shah, Alyque Padamse, Sandip Sikkand, along with the Primetime Theatre Company’s Sammy, 30 Days in September, Zen Katha and Kanyadaan. He has also been an art and lighting director for Zee TV’s World Millenium Concert, Sonu Nigam Night and A Daler Mahendi Show.

Pradeep Vaidyya Best Lighting Director
As a writer, director, music composer, light designer and trainer, Pradeep Vaidyya has over 20 years of experience working in theatre. He has adapted several plays into Marathi including Cycle of Spring, Achalayatan, Tissue, Not Brain Surgeons. He has won several awards like The Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Award, Zee Gaurav and the Bhalaba Kelkar Award.

Cast and Credits

On Stage
Savitri:Lillete Dubey
The Man: Mohan Agashe
Binni: Ira Dubey
Ashok: Rajeev Siddarhta
Kinni: Anuschka Sawhney

Off stage
Written by: Mohan Rakesh
Produced and Directed by: Lillete Dubey
Assistant to the Director: Anuschla Sawhney
Lighting Designer: Pradeep Vaidyya
Original Music Score: Gandhaar Sangoram
Set Designer: Bhola Sharma and Lillete Dubey
Costume Designer: Trishna Popat
Backstage and Props: Altaf Shaikh
Photography: Natasha Hemrajani
Administration: Rupali Kataria
Artwork: Mamta Somaiya