THREE SHORT PLAYS: THE LAST ANNAL OF ALAMGIR, KARNA AND AFTERMATH
AT A GLANCE THE PLAY CAST AND CREDITS
SRC, 4.30 pm, Wed, 20 Jan
English, 90 minutes
Director: Avaan Patel
Playwright: Ranjit Hoskote
The Last Annal of Alamgir --- A portrait of an emperor in his declining years, Hosokte’s Alamgir is a personage who inhabits the speculative, poetic space of possibility between history and fiction. He is and is not the Mughal tyrant Aurangzeb, who goes over memories of his entire life until he reaches a point where he lies dying, fighting an enemy who cannot be dominated. We also see him invoking his angel – a character who he refers to but cannot speak to and with whom he communicates most freely.
Karna
--- Inspired by Karnabharam, a fragment written by the ancient Sanskrit dramatist Bhasa, Hoskote’s Karna faces audiences as a contemporary figure driven by mixed compulsions, anxieties and convictions. The action of the play unfolds on what turns out to be the last day of Karan’s life.
Aftermath --- Conceived of as a ‘score for six voices’, the setting in this play is of a post-apocalyptic future in which an unnamed catastrophe has destroyed human civilization as we know it. In the ruins, six survivors, each damaged by these events, come upon an archive and upon each other. It turns out they are figures from various periods and societies in history – Ghalib and Gandhari, Indra and Shahid, Sleeper and Lost. They address each other in fragments of texts that they half remember. Gradually, from this meandering, circling, malingering cross talk, there develops a portrait of the futility and sorrow of war.
The Last Annal of Alamgir
Tom Alter, Avaan Patel
Karna

Vijay Varma, Vivek Tandon, Gerish Khemani, Danesh Khambata
Aftermath
Tom Alter, Avaan Patel, Vijay Varma, Vivek Tandon, Gerish Khemani, Danesh Khambata

Light Design: Sam Kerawalla
Production Manager: Neville Bhandara
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