Desert Rose

Ila Arun's Mareechika transports Ibsen's metaphors of the sea to the sands of Rajasthan

If Ibsen were sitting in the audience watching Mareechika, he would wonder who wrote the play first," remarked Ila Arun, who has adapted Henrik Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea for her directorial venture, Mareechika. The play is about a woman of many shades, her relationships, desires and suffocations. The story is presented in a folk form using the ancient phad narrative. In this form of storytelling, bhopa and bhopi — traditional Rajasthani male and female storytellers respectively, use painted scrolls called phad to tell their stories using live folk music, colourful montages and costumes.

Describing the play as a Baisakhi gift to Chandigarh, Arun has teamed up with her 29-year-old theatre group, Surnai's long-time director KK Raina for this production, which is her ninth adaptation and one that was commissioned for the Delhi Ibsen Festival two years ago. Ironically, after reading most of Ibsen's plays, Arun zeroed in on The Lady from the Sea, which is set near the sea to take the story to the sands of Rajasthan, for she felt this was the story she could do justice to in this tradition. "The desert used to be a sea once and I minutely studied the characters, metaphors and references to create a new story with the geography, language, costumes and psyche of another culture. But in spite of it all, Mareechika is about Ibsen's creativity. So the structure of the original is sacrosanct," says Arun. The play, according to her, brings to stage many moods, shades and essentially the importance of a woman's desire, her various colours and a woman's voice. For Raina, the co-direction, he admits gave him a new perspective to appreciate the way music is used to highlight the text. "It seems the play was written in Rajasthan," says Raina.

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