Taking the satire route to success

Hyderabad’s Darpan Theatre Group has time and again presented plays with an underlined social message. With its latest production, Samajhdaar Log, the group has taken the classical ‘social satire’ route through comic elements to deliver its socially relevant message. The play highlighted the topical issues plaguing the common man on the street like poverty, scarcity of food and unemployment. Talking about the play, director Ali Ahmed says, “With Samajhdaar Log, we have taken the help of satire and comedy to deliver the message. Even though we have staged this play twice before, the actors in our current production are not part of the earlier team.”

Talking about the challenges of a new team and the ease of moulding the script to recent times, Nikhilesh, a part of the production team says, “For any play it’s a challenge to get the actors to fit into the role, which is the director’s job. I have seen how Ali has got the actors to get into the skin of their roles.” For Chand and Srikanth two of the actors of the play, the whole experience has been a great learning. They have worked on other plays with Darpan Theatre, but with this play they have stepped up their game. “We all did our studies on mental health to get to know more about it. The more we studied, the more we learned about the difficulties they face. Even in the play, we have mentioned the apathy they face in society,” says Chand.