To watch a crackling murder mystery live on stage will always be an experience unmatched to the thrills and fancies of the big screen. Along with all its technical glitches and limitations in terms of set, sound and lighting, the honesty that theatre brings with it makes a stage production far more special than any of its film counterparts.
MigHT-i Theatre’s Dus is enjoyable for this sheer honesty of the medium and the courage of its makers to pull off a crime thriller as complex as Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (also known as Ten Little Indians) with utmost simplicity.
In his Hindi version of the ace crime writer’s most popular mystery, writer-director Prashant Belwalkar doesn’t deviate much from the original play, making his adaptation as accurately close to Christie’s. Although he chooses to retain the original ending of Christie’s 1939 novel by the same name, which she decided to change while writing the play based on the book four years later. So we have Judge Dharmadhikari (Shailesh Prajapati) in the role of Justice Lawrence Wargrave, who commits suicide in the end, after meticulously plotting murder of his nine victims.
Set in a lonely palace on the hills near Shimla, instead of a vague Indian Island off the coast of Devon in Christie’s play, Dus begins with the 10 guests arriving at the palace after receiving an invitation from A J BEEN (a homophone for ‘Ajnabee’, meaning Stranger in Hindi). Each one of them have committed a crime in their past, for which they escaped punishment. As a result, they must die now.
Dus, like most plays, relies heavily on its bunch of actors to create the intrigue and suspense in the story, and take it forward. And do they do justice. The cast, consisting of a mix of theatre professionals and hobby artistes, show a commendable flair for acting, including the ones who belong to diversely different professions, having little experience in theatre.
Whether it’s Rupal Solanki as the attractive and funny secretary of the hosts, Santanu Ghosh as the detective with a sonorous voice (also the set designer for the play), Kkuntal Trivedi as the flirtatious guy and the only one who’s death is more of an accident or Prajapati as the killer judge (also the light designer for the play), everyone makes their parts convincing enough and thus, make Dus a gripping watch.
And of course, there were the amusing moments. The disappearance of the soldier statuettes, for instance, was a huge distraction. Even though it was a deliberate attempt to have a hand come out from behind the curtain to pull a statuette – as an indicator of the next death and also to hint at the fact that the murderer was an actual person – every time that happened, there were giggles in the audience.
This is Belwalkar’s second adaptation of Agatha Christie’s work, the first one being Jaal – The Trap, based on her play The Mousetrap, and staged last year at the South Side Arts Festival as a part of Christie’s 120th Anniversary celebrations. MigHT-i Theatre returned to the South Side Arts Festival again this year with Dus, which was staged on November 3. Indian Weekender and Humm FM 106.2 were the media sponsors.