One hell of a play

It is difficult to even get a glimpse of the man. Sabareesh is outside the KTM Theatre at the Regional Theatre in Thrissur where Marana match has just been staged. It is the 10th International Theatre Festival of Kerala (ITFoK) and the hundreds that filled the hall are coming out in search of the man who wrote the script. Sabareesh smiles adorably, hugs a few, and calls himself just ‘one of the inputs’ for the play directed by Sarath ettan – Sarath Revathy.

He walks with a stick – he has been affected by cerebral palsy since birth. Sabareesh – or Sabari as he is fondly called — took to reading a lot and did not like English for a long time. But realising it is the language that quite a lot of works from around the world got translated to, he took to English and ended up working as a lecturer of the language, first at Government Victoria College, Palakkad, later at Vadakara and now at Government College, Chittoor. It is at Victoria that Sabari sits with Sarath in discussions for a play called Metamorphosis of a Moustache, giving ‘inputs’. “We don’t start with a script. We start with a basic idea, give all our inputs, add humour and other elements and write the script in the end,” he says.

The idea of Maranamatch or Death Match struck to them in a village Alanallur near Mannarkkad. It was a play meant for the people there with no theatre background. The idea came from a newspaper article about The Death Match, a football game that was played between Hitler’s Nazi team and Dynamo Kyiv, a team of Ukrainian Jews. Several stories and myths have come out about the historic match played in 1942 during World War II.  “One story is that Hitler was disturbed to know there was this team (of Jews) that beat everyone else when he believed no one could beat the Aryan race.

There is a story that the team was threatened that they’d be killed if they won the match. But even after knowing that, they couldn’t play to lose. That spirit of football is something that a remote village in Kerala could connect with,” Sabari says. The play begins with this historic match and then moves to Malappuram where a local team is practicing. A new team of Kabaddi players wearing khaki trousers claim that space is theirs since ‘there was a police station there many, many years ago’. The lines and the setting obviously connect to the political situation in India. The references are not even blurred. There is a scene where a man meant to be Hitler speaks German and his translators begin the speech with bayiom behanom. There is also a link to the infamous Aadhaar linking here. “You haven’t linked, you can ask no questions.”

“Fascism is a state of mind. It is happening pan-India and Kerala can’t be kept apart. But Sarath ettan thinks with so much of love that he wants to include everyone. Not by accepting them but there are people who don’t know what is happening. We want to show them and understand with them,” Sabari says.