Category: Fiction
Publisher: Hachette India
Rights: World rights available
These two books are companion volumes, bringing together the complete set of Manjula Padmanabhan’s theatrical plays. Blood and Laughter contains six full-length plays while Laughter and Blood contains 21 short performance pieces. Both volumes share a common introduction, since the books are independent of one another. Each of the plays, however, has an introduction specific to itself.
The full-length plays include Padmanabhan’s two best known pieces, Lights Out and Harvest. Less well-known is The Mating Game Show, a biting satire that combines the carnival atmosphere of “reality” game-shows with the grotesque but all-too-real practice of dowry murders. This play has had several rehearsed readings and was once filmed as a TV serial by the award-winning film director Govind Nihalani. It was, however, never released and has also never been performed onstage.
Of the other three plays – The Artist’s Model, Astro-Nuts and Consequences – the first has never been performed except as a table reading. The second was performed as a rehearsed-reading by the theatre students of Tufts University, Boston, in 2006. The third was produced and performed as a rehearsed reading with movement, at the College of Wooster, in Ohio, under the excellent direction of Shirley Huston-Findley, Professor of Theatre and Dance.
The short plays have had a very different trajectory, perhaps as a result of being short and therefore much easier to perform. Some are monologues intended as one-person performance pieces, some are skits for two or three actors. A number have been performed, both as readings and on stage. A couple have been filmed as short performances. One of them (The Anarchist) has been performed on stage, as an adaptation, in Hindi, in Mumbai, by the well-known theatre director and actor, Namrata Sharma Jape.
During the pandemic years, the Chennai-based performance platform Prakriti, under the guidance of its director Ranvir Shah, very generously created a monthly online performance schedule. Between November 2020 and October 2021, different teams of performer/directors shared videos of one short piece each, followed by a lively virtual discussion between the performers, the online audience and the playwright.
Taken together, these two volumes bring together a unique body of work. Padmanabhan has written most of her scripts without the support of performers or theatre groups. Despite what might normally be considered a handicap, her scripts continue to attract attention and requests for performances, in India and internationally.
The author: Manjula Padmanabhan