A play that will be performed in the Rangashankara theatre in Bengaluru on Sunday will see something unusual: climate activist Greta Thunberg will be wearing an Indian schoolgirl’s uniform, in conversation with Mahatma Gandhi and singing songs about the dying planet in Kannada.
Veteran theatre director Prasanna Heggodu’s latest worked, titled ‘Greta and Ramayana’, brings the discussion on climate crisis home, making the Swedish teenage activist a character in the play, perhaps for the first time in Indian theatre.
Asked when he came across Greta and her initiative, Prasanna says, “I don’t think there is anyone who has not come across Greta in the last two years. The point is, the enemy or the villain or the monster in the story is masculine arrogance. You see that in political parties, you see that with goons and you see it in the market. And suddenly, you see that women are coming to the fore. They are protesting everywhere, whether it is in Brazil, Venezuela or Shaheen Bagh.”
The work is divided into two parts separated by an interval. In Part 1, we see Greta in conversation with a shape-shifting comical figure, who first appears as her mother, then as Gandhi and finally as a very playful dog.
I was allowed to sit in on one of the rehearsals, and what struck me about the play was how despite the serious topic, it’s funny and does not shy away from breaking off into songs. The conversation I heard was between Greta and her mother, one adamant on not taking a flight because of the carbon emissions, the other breaking into song and dance because her daughter is now famous.
The humour was carefully inserted so as to not overwhelm the audience with facts and numbers. Prasanna said that some of the facts for the play were drawn from a small booklet that Penguin has published, containing about ten of Greta’s speeches. But that’s not all: to make Greta’s story reach out to an Indian audience, the activist’s fictional alter ego will be seen on stage in a school uniform, in a costume no one has seen the real Greta in.
“You see, we wanted Indians to understand that she is a schoolgirl. If we don’t put her in that uniform, she may look over 20,” Prasanna says. The director makes the play even more immediate at one point. “At one point when Greta talks about fumes rising, the joker says, ‘Does that mean Rangashankara will be filled with fumes?’. Greta replies that it is already filled with fumes, and that is why they have air-conditioned it. This, in turn, connects to what the real Greta says about air conditioning.”
The second part of the work will see a rendering of the Ramayana by singer M D Pallavi as told from a woman’s point of view. What moulds these two parts together is the parallel between Sita, a daughter of the Earth, and Greta, who is also that, albeit more figuratively.
Much of the weight of this heavy-duty play falls on two actors in their early twenties. Lahari plays Greta Thunberg and Durga Devi plays the joker figure. After the Rangashankara performance, the play will likely be performed in colleges, and Prasanna plans an interaction between the actors and the audience after the performance. He, however, will not be a part of it.
“We are planning to take this play around to colleges. And the idea is that there will be nobody giving lectures. These two girls will have a discussion with the students,” he said.
When asked if he chose the actors because they ideologically lean in favour of Greta’s climate crisis movement, Prasanna says, “They don’t have to be. Today’s youth are not as dumb as we seem to think. Maybe they have some bad habits, but essentially, they are very conscious, so they have started protesting and coming on the street. They understand these things.
So, the idea is, bring the discourse between them.”
When I asked the girls about where they stand on the climate emergency issue as they would be part of these discussions, Lahari, who plays Greta, said that when she heard Greta speak, she thought, “Have things really gotten this serious? Then what are we sitting here and doing?”
To Durga, it was about developing enough sense to switch off the light when one leaves a room. “If someone younger is watching, they may learn from us.”