Kindly Do Not Cross All Limits

Theatre has been broadly defined as “a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors, to present experiences of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance.”

Yet, watching the performances staged by Padatik Theatre under the direction, design and script of Vinay Sharma who heads Rikh, makes one question any definition that tries to trap the term “theatre” within certain constraints which, over decades, have conditioned the audience to expect certain mandatory rules within which a theatre performance needs to restrict itself. Of course, this defiance of any dictionary definition of theatre in India has been already done by the late Badal Sarkar ages ago.

But today, it happens to be Vinay Sharma, who has, in his own way, redefined the term “theatre” over the past decades, as artistic director of Padatik. He has been trying to present plays through his group of veteran and very young actors and crew to present his own version of “theatre”.

It is a very individualistic interpretation of theatre that sustains the traditional concept of a theatrical performance such as a performative space, actors, technical team with lighting, sound effects costume, make-up and music but veers away in terms of his individualistic interpretation of the sources he draws from thereby establishing something that may be variedly termed “anti-theatre’ or, “theatre of the mind” or, say, “purely political theatre” where the politics slowly evolves as the central subject and theme of the performance.

Padatik and Rikh’s latest presentation in Hindi is called Kripaya Seema Paar Na Kare which is a performance in three acts sourced back to three original plays from the past abstracted from (a) Udhwasta Dharmashala, (b) Bahari Bhasha and (c) Paani Piyoge.

Enquiry (Udhwastha Dharmashala) is a famous Marathi play by renowned Marxist playwright G.P. Deshpande, focusing on an intellectual's ideological struggles against the totalitarian institution he is employed in. The title translates to "Demolished Rest House," symbolizing crumbling ideologies in institutions, and the play explores personal and political conflicts through an inquiry into a left-wing professor, Sridhar Kulkarni, making it a significant work in Marathi and Indian drama.

Bahari Bhasha is the Hindi translation of the Harold Pinter play Mountain Language first performed in 1988 at the Royal Theatre in London. Pinter, in a letter, insisted that the text had more universal relevance than it appeared to present. "This play is not about the Turks and the Kurds. I mean, throughout history, many languages have been banned––the Irish have suffered, the Welsh have suffered and the Urdu and the Estonians' language banned” he wrote.

Paani Piyoge is also adapted from another Harold Pinter play One for the Road first staged in 1984, considered as Pinter's "statement about the human rights abuses of totalitarian governments". The play is said to have been inspired from a book about torture on Argentina's military dictatorship; later, in January 1984, Pinter wrote it after an argument with two Turkish girls at a family birthday party on the subject of torture.

The basic message that comes across, loud and clear, from all three performances, taken individually or collectively, has both universal as well as national relevance as they inspire anger and helplessness among the audience watching the three separate plays with the first one performed in an overlapping manner.

Udhwasta Dharmashala functions as the recurrent satire on the total absence of democracy by subjecting a Marxist professor to a dramatized, set-up ‘inquiry’ charging him for ‘instigating his students’ towards Marxist ideologies. The so-called “enquiry board” membered by the leading administrators and professors are, ironically, dressed in white which starkly presents the irony of the so-called “investigation.”

Ashok Singh as Professor Kulkarni puts on a magnificent performance as Professor Kulkarni. The Padatik play, focused on institutional torture of an intellectual by other intellectuals based simply on ideological differences is strongly presented and matched with equal proficiency by his co-actors, namely Anubha Fatehpuria, Kalpana Thakur Jha and Kanishka Tiwari.

The total performances of both Bahari Bhasha and Paani Piyoge are based on two completely different plays and since the main antagonist is performed by the same actor Vinay Sharma, and set in the same space with identical décor and placings, these appear a bit confusing to a non-intellectual critic like yours truly but over the performance, the distinctions begin to get clear.

Bahari Bhasha is a direct attack, if we may call it so, on the terrible violence being inflicted right now on the poor and the marginalized simply because they are unable to communicate in Hindi or English and can only communicate in their mother tongue. So, language is turned into a weapon of torture and abuse mainly against the marginalized and the migrant for their lack of communicating abilities and also, as an excuse for the powerful to exert their self-assumed and electorally gained ‘power’ against the ‘powerless.’

According to one study, “Language is weaponized as a tool of attack through the manipulation of identity, the normalization of violence, and the exercise of state or social power. In 2025, this phenomenon, often termed "linguistic cruelty" or "weaponized language," continues to be a central vector in modern ethnic, political, and digital conflicts.”

Pani Piyoge is a direct and open attack on a helpless prisoner who has been left hungry and thirsty being offered a jug of water but not actually allowed even a sip of it by the dictator sitting on his throne of power and abuse who drinks the water in his presence and takes malicious joy out of it.

Though this play reminds one of the torture and killings of Jews in Hitler’s regime, its universality has been reiterated through the attack on Gaza which continues unabated and the merciless torture and killings of the helpless marginals in every country across the globe. India is no exception.

The beauty of these three presentations lies in that that the violence is happening almost entirely off the performance space except the “Paani Piyoge” segment where the title itself spells out the torture. The location remains unspecified as it does in Bahari Bhasha but the powerful and the powerless are identified quite clearly though many among the audience might be able to put a name and a face to both.

The décor harks back to our experience of watching Black-and-White films and brings in sharp visuals about the abuser/s and the abused very clearly. The performance space is two-tiered which demarcates the three presentations while the music is inspired by the spirit of the plays.

A masterful performance that keeps ruminating in your mind till you gather the confidence to put down a review on paper. The title of the performance, Kripaya Seema Paar Na Kare is a political statement that gives away the acidic sarcasm inherent in the stories.