Shabana Azmi in Broken Images

Imagine this: just one actor on stage. No set transformations, no costume changes, little or no action.

Yet you sit for a full hour, totally engrossed, and are almost surprised to find that, though you’ve sat immobile in your seat, you’ve traveled into complex worlds, into the innermost reaches of mind and heart.

Few people could pull this off but the combination of  actor Shabana Azmi, director Alyque Padamsee and playwright Girish Karnad makes ‘Broken Images’ a play to watch and relish. To that, add a fourth player – digital technology. In this psychological thriller electronic images, video and television juxtapose to become another powerful force, almost a character, adding a lot to the high drama.

“When T. S. Eliot talked of ‘a heap of broken images where sun beats and the dead tree gives no shelter’ in his ‘ Waste Land’, he was obviously talking of concrete images found piled in a desert,” says Karnad, “The images that surround us—in every burgeoning Indian megalopolis— are digital, insubstantial but persistent, and the desert they define is our ‘hyper-reality’. We have all morphed into our own images.”

What’s real and what’s make-believe?  The play revolves around Manjula Sharma, a moderately successful Hindi writer who has hit the big time by publishing her first novel in English. Suddenly she’s a global star. You see her in a television studio, giving one of countless interviews. She is the suave celebrity, chatting about her life and times, giving due credit to her husband and to Malini, her crippled sister who inspired her. You listen as the story unfolds – and then suddenly the television screen at the back comes alive – and suddenly you have two Manjulas on stage, each competing for your attention.

Is the second Manjula a phantom, a voice of her conscience or perhaps the spirit of her dead sister? As the two Manjulas duel mentally, you get sucked into the volatile inner drama of  sibling rivalry.  Your sympathies and loyalties change constantly and you really are not sure who the victim is and who is the victimized.

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