It’s a well-known fact that Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap is the longest running play in the world. Nothing works as well as a good mystery. Closer home, I did some research about plays that had stood the test of time.

In Bombay, one has heard the legends of Marathi productions such as Sahi Re Sahi (which had a long running sequel too), Vastraharan (with over 5,000 shows), and Wade Chirabandi, which seem to have been running forever. There is a strong sense of legacy associated with these titles.

Going strong

Sahi Re Sahi is an out and out entertainer. Funny and serious in parts, with a dead man outwitting notorious relatives and impostors from beyond the grave, this is a Marathi favourite. Vastraharan is a play within a play. A village is staging a play about the disrobing of Draupadi by the Kauravas, but things go awry as the performance is about to happen, and much hilarity ensues. Wade Chirabandi is more of a social family drama, dealing with an ancestral home falling apart, just like the joint family that lives in it.

In contrast, it seems Gujarati theatre believes in a massive number of shows in a limited time frame, after which the play is retired. Comedies and thrillers work particularly well. However, one play, Mareez, has been running successfully since 2004. This is, quite surprisingly, not a comedy, but a poetic exploration of the life and hardships of an artist.

A scene from The Interview   | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Hindi theatre has a couple of long-running successes. Hai Mera Dil, directed by the late Dinesh Thakur, opened in the year I was born. So it has been running for almost four decades. The play is an adaptation of an English play, Send Me No Flowers, by Norman Barasch and Carroll Moore (which later became a Doris Day and Rock Hudson movie), that premièred in the 60s.

Fighting for this longest running spot is Shatranj Ke Mohre, directed by Ramesh Talwar for IPTA. Interestingly, this isn’t an original Hindi play either. It is based on a Marathi play, Tujha Aahe Tujhya Pasha, and was adapted for IPTA by the legendary P.L. Deshpande.

English theatre doesn’t have plays that date back to the 70s. I mean Indian English plays. The classics, and the famous musicals, and the Shakespearean works are played out again and again, but in terms of homegrown productions, the list is smaller. Class of ’84 by Rahul DaCunha opened back in 2003, and still continues to do shows. It is widely known as the longest running English play here, and may have edged out the competition owing to sheer number of shows. Dance Like a Man by Mahesh Dattani was written in 1989, and produced for the stage in 1995. It celebrated 600 shows over 23 years in 2018.

Closer home, our longest running play opened in 2010. So it is now in its ninth year. The play is The Interview by Siddharth Kumar, which won a bunch of awards and really opened a lot of doors for us. The play is a satire on the corporate world, and is funny for the most part, before its bizarreness gets somewhat dark. But for the first 60 of its 80 minutes, it is greeted with guffaws. An interesting thing happened recently, when we were completing 117 shows.

Characters being judged

A key character in the play is a misogynist who is carrying on a workplace affair, while another character has a brief history of sexually harassing an intern. Both characters get their just desserts. One is punished, and both have moments of regret and repentance. However, their confessions and revelations, which were once a source of much laughter, were greeted with silence by the audience, or the occasional self-conscious laugh. Locker-room talk was finding no encouragement any more.

This, to my mind, is a direct result of the present environment, a sign that the times are changing. The play worked in totality, but it was being watched with a different perspective. The characters were being judged. I was initially thrown by this change, till I figured out why, and it all made complete sense. There is a heightened sense of awareness in the audience now.

This led me to believe something else. A play needs to not just be relevant, but stay relevant. How else will it achieve timelessness? This isn’t easy. Is the solution to play it safe, and be more generic? That doesn’t sound exciting. Perhaps the key is to evolve. I guess it helps that theatre is one medium that allows that.

Akarsh Khurana is a theatre producer and director and hence often broke. To cope, he writes and directs films and web series and occasionally acts, albeit reluctantly.