How theatre director KP Suveeran’s encounters with social inequalities shapes his award-winning works | Eye News,The Indian Express
Earlier this week, the director of feted plays such as Bhaskara Pattelarum Thommiyude Jeevithavum and Ayussinte Pusthakam won the Kerala state's Mullanezhi Award for Lifetime Achievement
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HomeEyeHow theatre director KP Suveeran's encounters with social inequalities shapes his award-winning works
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How theatre director KP Suveeran’s encounters with social inequalities shapes his award-winning works
Earlier this week, the director of feted plays such as Bhaskara Pattelarum Thommiyude Jeevithavum and Ayussinte Pusthakam won the Kerala state's Mullanezhi Award for Lifetime Achievement
Written by Dipanita Nath
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September 16, 2022 9:40:12 am
A scene from KP Suveeran’s play Bhaskara Pattelarum Thommiyude Jeevithavum. (Courtesy: Teamwork Arts)
When one of the country’s prestigious theatre events, the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards (META), returned before a live audience in July, it marked a fightback for the struggling art form. On show were four plays that had been created in the years preceding COVID-19 and had won top honours at META in 2020. Bhaskara Pattelarum Thommiyude Jeevithavum, by a maverick theatre director from Kerala, KP Suveeran, was among the selections.
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The play, from 2018, looks at social hierarchies, with the central protagonists being a ruthless landlord, Pattelar, and his obedient servant Thommi. Thommi carries out Pattelar’s orders without asking questions about right and wrong, until his conscience begins to stir and, eventually, pushes him out of his servility. META has described the play as “an inspiring tale of freedom from bondage”. Suveeran won the award for Best Stage Design. The trophy sits alongside four Kerala Sangeeta Nataka Akademi awards (for Udambadikkolam in1997, for Fire and Rain in 2002, for Ayussinte Pustakam in 2008 and a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019 ) as well as a National Award (2011) for Byari, Suveeran’s first feature film that he made in a dying language called Beary. Earlier this week, Kerala state’s Mullanezhi Award for Lifetime Achievement was given to Suveeran.
Suveeran’s landscapes are the gritty pits of society, which he brings out through human stories of man-woman relationships. His 2008 play Ayussinte Pusthakam — which was selected for META in 2009 — shows the gender inequity in orthodox religion; Byari is about the suffocating rules of marriage. For 10 years, Suveeran used to dress only in black while he focussed on uncomfortable truths. “You will not see me in a march or a vigil but I am doing theatre about what worries me. I am against all kinds of power that human beings like to exercise over other human beings, whether it is patriarchal dominance over women; racism; or class or caste superiority,” he says.
Nowadays, though, Suveeran wears all colours. “I, sometimes, wear white also,” he adds. It’s a colour he politicises in Bhaskara Pattelarum — from the clear white of the landlord Pattelar’s clothes to the unbleached colour of Thommi’s costume to the sandalwood shade of the sari that Pattelar gifts Thommi’s wife, Omana, after raping her.
Rating: 5