The Pied Piper of Bommanahalli

 

Express Features

First Published : 12 May 2010 12:46:00 AM IST

Last Updated :

KOCHI: Children’s theatre Mazhavillu is all set to stage Bommanahalliyile Kinnara Yogi on Friday evening. The play revolves around Kuvempu’s imaginative adaptation of Browning’s Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Chandradasan has made it into a poetic narrative, sung and enacted by a group of singer-actors.

The meaning and objective of this production is basically achieved through the rendering of the characters and their depiction. Each character is delineated and represented in specific expose so that the narrative is developed into a form that relates to the contemporary reality and time.

Gowda is the usual, inefficient village-chief interested in nothing but collecting taxes, eating and sleeping.

In a shift from the poem, Gowda does not offer 6000 gold coins to Yogi as a reward for killing the rats.

He offers this amount to any villager who can stop people from complaining. One of the villagers tell Yogi about this. In fact, the village does not have that much money to spare, and Gowda is left to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to Yogi.

Yogi is a performer and charmer who is able to lure people. He boasts that he is a friend of Lord Siva and Vishnu and has eradicated rats from Kailasa and Vaikunta.

And he insists on getting the money for his services. Yogi is alien to the rustic simplicity of the rural Bommanahalli.

He comes from a faraway place with some odd objectives which the simpletons of the village cannot recognise.

They are victims to the existing practice of Gowda, the rat attack and later to the ploy of Yogi.

The rats are naughty and daring; they do all kinds of mischief. The story of the pied piper is narrated in direct, simple, transparent and candid style. It is attempted to create a cosmos of the exuberance, earthiness, and hurdles of rural life where various ecosystems co-exist.

Towards the end of the play the people understand the pain of the lone rat and decide not to kill it.

It is the empathy with which men and animals understand and respond reciprocally that expresses the mutuality of existence subtly but clearly.

The performance structure, design and form are derived from many narrative forms of various living traditions.

The play will be staged at Changampuzha Park on May 14 at 6.30 p.m.

Courtesy ; Indian Express, 12 May 2010