Metroscape

Oct 25, 1999

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What's cooking in Chandigarh?
Here's a new recipe for theatre. Neelam Man Singh Chaudhary's Kitchen Katha, performed at Chandigarh's famed Rock Garden last week, has used the ambience and aromas of the traditional Indian kitchen to stir up what is already being hailed as a pathbreaking production. The director of such plays as The Mad Woman of My City -- the first Indian play to be staged at the prestigious Avignon festival in 1996 -- Chaudhary has used the metaphor of food to reveal a woman's hidden world of desires. Scripted by renowned Punjabi poet Surjit Patar, Kitchen Katha is the story of Chand Kaur told through the narrative by her granddaughter.

Food here is a medium for expressing her emotions and escaping her miseries. For Chand Kaur, the simple act of peeling an onion, for instance, is the perfect subterfuge for some quiet tears. "Rather than making a jingoistic statement, the idea is to spice up the play through nuances," says Chaudhary.

Kitchen Katha was performed at the recent national Sangeet Natak Akademi festival in Bangalore and is now travelling to Hong Kong. So impressed was film maker Govind Nihalani by the Bangalore show that he has already decided to make a film of it.

-Ramesh Vinayak

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