Salvador Kent
A Sikh is a neighbour to a couple, a Muslim man and a Hindu woman. They sit in the couple’s living room, friends. And then the parition is announced. Unerase Poetry here in Prague create an emotional history of the divide and its consequences that succeeds in its simplicity, and represents this troubling moment in South Asian history through the lens of those who inherited its legacy.
Yahya Bootwaala, Priyanshi Bansal and Simar Singh represent the hugely popular Mumbai based poetry collective in this foray into dramatic theatre. The form they choose is a mixture of a light-touch dramatic text which often is mixed with a series of spoken-word poems, which represent the character’s inner life. This is for the most part effective, and the poems are enchanting. The story itself is simple but works to show the essential tensions between family, religion and society the partition brought about — and at its centre is a reflection on love, treated with a delicious ambivalence, that is to say often made the punchline of a joke but also allowed to breathe and develop through poetic breaks.
What is most interesting is how distinct the spoken word culture feels. The poems are often accompanied by music and really swoon with it, functioning in a heightened register that took me some getting used to, but was moving to much of the audience. All three performers are good poets in their own rights, with Bansal’s reading particularly well. As actors, interpreting characters, the trio are very watchable and although they often land on tropes, the tropes don’t hinder from our immersion nor apprecation.
The play is happy to delight in anachronisms, and so do the poems. Written by the performers themselves, these are poems that come from their own lives, but function within the narratives that they place them in. The characters too are drawn somewhat autobiographically, corresponding to the religions of the poets family histories – creating a beautiful mix of fiction and memory, poetry that is real in an event that was real in a fictionalised scenario. The trio are instinctually sharp when it comes to their stagecraft too, with a mango — charged with cultural memory, being an evocative and moving symbol throughout.
The play reaches its heights when it lets itself breathe. The poems read in silence shifted the atmosphere in the room to the sort of quiet electricity that puncutates the best theatre. A movingly slow ending was poignant, and recalled the mango with great pathos. The play is a complete product, and my impression was that the audience generally felt exactly what they needed to feel moment to moment.
Last Train from India is worth a watch for anyone here for the festival. It is an insight into a hugely popular cultural collective. It is a poignant retelling of a crucial, brutal moment of the twenteith century that lets the history speak for itself and instead stages ordinary lives that suffer under it. The performances are well worked, the poetry well written, and the event has a general warmth that makes it well worth an hour of your time at Prague Fringe.
Recommended Drink: Juice, or whiskey! (If you know you know).
You can catch Last Train from India on the 29th May at 8pm. Tickets are available through the Prague Fringe Online Box Office.
Image Credit: Siddhant Sawant
Raynar Rogers
Magdaléna Škerenčák
