Pawan Kumar, known for directing popular Kannada and multilingual films like Lifeu Ishtene, Lucia, U-Turn, Dhoomam, is making a comeback on stage after a five-year hiatus with the play The Final Rehearsal, on December 14.
Premiered in 2002, The Final Rehearsal is a one-man play, scripted, directed and performed by Pawan Kumar. It was last staged in 2018.
The play starts off with an actor rehearsing a monologue for an acting competition. When through with it, he interacts with the audience telling them how he had not been awarded the ‘Best Actor’ award previously and believes that he will make it this time. There is just one chair in the play and the chair is not considered a prop but a character, and the actor keeps talking to the chair, fighting with it, discussing the show, as co-actors would.
Throughout the performance the actor keeps playing different roles: Mark Anthony from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a young boy who is molested in the riots in Gujarat, a rag-picker named Gandhi, and so on. Towards the end, the actor decides to have a final rehearsal of the monologue before he goes for the competition and he starts rehearsing, but it turns out that the lines are similar but not the same. Does the actor win the award, or does it push him towards madness, is what the play talks about.
Facing live audience
Speaking to The Hindu, Pawan says that getting back on stage is never easy and there has never been a “been there done that” feeling for him. “Stage has always been the scary part no matter how many films I do, big stars I work with or how big a production I work in. The fact that you are facing an audience live, everything is tested in real time, the preparation can go out of the window, and you have to be open to all the magic and disasters that can happen on stage. So, it has always been not easy. Every time I do theatre, the fear from 20 years ago comes back.”
Pawan says that this play has been a career defining play for him as he had just quit engineering and had started writing the play when he was 20 years old. “I had quit engineering, and I was just 20 years old when I wrote this play. I was not professionally trained in theatre, there were not many theatre schools around for me to go to. I started realising that I could not read the plays that were written by playwrights like Girish Karnad, Badal Sircar, Vijay Tendulkar or Shakespeare, I did not know how to read and interpret them, but I had a strong craving to perform. I was hoping that someone would cast me in a play too. But none of these things were happening, and that is when this idea of writing and performing this play came”.
“C.R. Simha’s play on T.P. Kailasam is what inspired me to make this a solo performance. I used to go and watch at least one play every week at H.N. Kalakshetra during my college days, and that is when I saw this play of his. It made me realise that one person is enough to perform a play, and that is where it started from,” Pawan added.
Then and now
When asked about performing the play as a 20-year-old and now performing it as an established filmmaker, Pawan says there has never been a difference, but his style and understanding of the play has changed over the years.
“Doing the play when I was 20 in 2002 and now in 2023 when I am 41 years old is the same. I think I am equally fascinated and open to all the discoveries that are going to happen when I perform the play, the same way I was back in 2002. Luckily, I have recordings of the play from whenever I have performed, and I have been noticing that the play has been progressing with me as I am aging, as I am learning new things. I can clearly see that a lot of the text that I had written in 2002, I am actually able to render it and understand it better now.
The play will be staged at 7.30 p.m., at Ranga Shankara, J.P. Nagar. Tickets for The Final Rehearsal are available on BookMyShow and the Ranga Shankara box-office.
