Tales from the farmland

Scenes from A Farming Story during rehearsal. Pics/Muskkaan Jaferi

In an unnamed corner of the earth, a small community of hybrid creatures called Hummals are suffering. Enter Hummal monkeys, from another part of the world, with their own set of miseries. Does their arrival add to the Hummals' woes or is this a plot to obscure something sinister?

On the surface, A Farming Story by Irish-Indian writer Vineet Bhalla is a dystopian fairy tale. But as the script unravels, its eerie resonance with contemporary issues becomes more obvious. The play, where Hummals or human-animals who farm for a living struggle with crop failures, and where Hummal monkeys turn refugees in a bid to flee forest fires, won the 2016 Sultan Padamsee Playwriting Award.

Running for the same award was Faezeh Jalali's Shikhandi, which finished runner-up. But as creative exchange goes, Jalali and Bhalla, shared scripts over email. And so stark was the relevance of the latter's writing for Jalali that the theatre director, known for her socially relevant plays and experimentation with form, decided to take it up as her next project. After months of reading, brainstorming and rehearsal, A Farming Story, a FATS TheArts production in association with Flying Kite Films, is ready to be staged on November 10.

Scenes from A Farming Story during rehearsal. Pics/Muskkaan Jaferi

"The play was written during the Syrian refugee crisis. From the macro universal picture to basic human-to-human connection, you can connect the play to what you connect with best," shares Jalali. So, environmental degradation, powerful corporations and their devious ways of passing the buck - in this case to anguished migrants - all come together in the play.

In accordance with its theme, most of the props have been procured from friends and colleagues. All the costumes have been upcycled, too. "Nothing that we create should add extra waste to the world. This is an ideal that guides us," she says.

Faezeh Jalali

A challenge that Jalali faced was the word-heavy script, which was at variance with the kind of scripts she usually works with. "But Vineet was very accommodating, and worked with us to make it concise," she says, adding that Bhalla will be in Mumbai to watch the play's premiere.

Another area where she found the playwright's support was her decision to have a traverse stage for the play, where the audience sits on two sides of the stage, facing each other. "So much of the play is about us versus them that an underlying question of 'Whose side are you on?' runs through it," she explains. Unlike Shikhandi, which was all grey, in a fairy tale, things are quite black and white."

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