by Mehru N Nisa
SRINAGAR: Ropyi Rood means the rain of money in Kashmiri and a packed Tagore Hall witnessed it happen. Sahil Shafi directed the theatre play written by ace playwright Sajood Sailani.
The artists of SR Theatre, Ganderbal on March 25, at Tagore Hall, Srinagar, performed the play.
The story is about a hermit, Gosoune, played by Nazir Bhat, who is saddened by the conditions of the poor populace. He is upset because of the unequal distribution of wealth in society. On one front, he sees the well-off people who have no worries about making money or spending it; while on the other he sees people who have to opt for the wrong ways of earning money.
The story starts when four men – a politician (Syed Imtiyaz), a businessman (Sheikh Shakeel), a card dealer (Aquib Hameed) and an actor (Sahil Shafi) apparently meet to bring revolution in the society but every one of them is busy in trying to earn more money for himself.
Another scene shows two drunken men – played by Sahil Shafi and Wani Sahil, who are rich enough to give charity and to even spend their money on luxuries like alcohol.
The third pair of the people are of two thieves – played by Mohsin Qadir and Hilal Bhat, who are running from some person they were trying to steal from.
After a while, Gosoun meets Naarad Mani (Hashim Rasool) who gets ready to help him by asking Laxmi, the Goddess of wealth (Shafiya Maqbool), to resolve the issue but she doesn’t concur with their plan.
Towards the end, Naarad Mani and Gosoune find a clever way of distributing the wealth equally among the humans but the greed of beneficiaries and their hunger comes in the way. Is the money distributed equally then? Or do they just keep fighting over it? The ending doesn’t answer these questions but leaves the viewer with a reflective thought of how most of the privileges and resources are taken for granted by us.
While the play tried to touch comedy through its supposedly funny dialogues, it couldn’t arouse any amusement in the audience. With the subtle use of lights and background music, very few distractions were caused in the play.
The play had materialism, greed and selfishness of humans as the main themes. While the story was complete and interesting, its execution on the stage was slow and dawdling. Till a point, it felt like the three storylines are totally parallel and have no connection with each other but towards the end, the plot came around and a good show was put on while the execution could have been a lot better in terms of dialogue delivery and the pace of the story.
