Close to three months ago, Mohammad Ali Baig’s theatre group, Qadir Ali Baig Theatre Foundation, was invited to be a part of the week-long Hyderabad Heritage Festival. Following the invitation, he began working on a script for a new play, writing with 24-year-old Chennai-based author Prarthana Rao, aka Noor. In three weeks, the two put together Quli: Dilon Ka Shahzaada, depicting the legendary love story of Muhammad Quli Qutub Shah, a sultan of the Qutb Shahi dynasty and founder of the city of Hyderabad, and his wife, Bhagmati.
“I gave her the structure and a synopsis and, in about three nights, we had the first draft of the play,” says Hyderabad-based Baig. The two writers also took on the lead roles of the sultan and his wife, and the play opened to a full house at Golconda Fort. A month later, in May, Baig was invited to stage the play at National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA), Mumbai’s, Hindi theatre festival, Ananda Hindi Natya Utsav. Now, Baig has been invited to take the production to the Footsbarn Theatre Festival in France, on July 17 and 18.
Like all of Baig’s other productions, Quli: Dilon Ka Shahzaada is large-scale and rather grand. At Golconda Fort, Baig arrived on a white horse to deliver the opening monologue. Unlike the others, however, this production was designed so that it could be scaled down to suit other venues. “We can do away with the monologue I delivered on horse-back,” says Baig. At the NCPA’s Experimental Theatre, there was no scope for such a grand entrance and it was excluded from the production. Similarly, when the group travels to France next month, they will present this modified version.
The Footsbarn Theatre Festival will mark a first for the group in terms of the performance venue. Plays at Footsbarn are performed in a specially built theatre tent, to an audience much smaller than the sort Baig and his group are used to. “We have never performed in a tent before, so that will be a challenge,” he says. “I get a great joy out of performing for large audiences, but it’s a different thrill to perform for smaller audiences.”
An ad filmmaker by profession, Baig had quit his father’s Qadir Ali Baig Theatre Foundation because he thought it was “too intense”. However, in the eight years since, the younger Baig has stuck to his venture, making one grand production after another, paying tribute to his father, a popular figure in Indian theatre. “Theatre is not a hobby or a profession,” he says. “It’s a tribute to Baba and it’s my duty.”
source: http://www.indianexpress.com / The Indian Express / Home> Indian Express / by Zaira Arslan zaira.arslan@expressindia.com / Sunday – June 30th, 2013