A boy collapses. The family panics. Two men are summoned to revive him, and neither of them has any business being in the room.
That is the setup of Purvabhyaas, the Hindi comedy Natrang staged on Sunday, 20 September, written by Om Prakash and directed by Neeraj Kant. It is a farce about credentialism — about two people who have decided that confidence is the same thing as expertise, and about what happens when they are put in a room together and asked to prove it.
The first is a Hakim, gloriously certain, who prescribes his own 'Amar Bhaskar' powder to absolutely everyone: a nervous middle-aged woman, a farmer whose cow has stopped giving milk, anyone who will stand still long enough. The second is a professor of hypnosis with a taste for theatre, who puts his patients under and has them imagining lions and elephants until they emerge considerably more frightened than when they went in.
Summoned to the same fainting boy, the two do not collaborate. They compete. The play's real engine is not the medicine but the ego — each man determined to be the one who produces the cure, and neither willing to admit that he has no idea what is wrong.
The ending is the joke landing on both of them. The boy sits up and explains that he was never ill at all: he was rehearsing for a Natrang play, and he is perfectly fine. A comedy about people faking competence closes by revealing that the one person in the room who knew exactly what he was doing was the actor.
Who was on stage
The cast was Pawan Verma, Aryan Sharma, Kushal Bhat, Lal Mohd, Aadesh Dhar, Vanshika Slathia and Damini Thakur. Lights were handled by Neeraj Kant, presentation by Priyal Ashok Gupta, and coordination by Mohd Yaseen.
Seven actors is a full stage for a farce, and it is also the more interesting thing about the listing: most of those names belong to young performers working through Natrang's Sunday slot. That is the part of the operation that tends to get less attention than the plays themselves.
Why this happens every week
Sunday Theatre is Natrang's weekly series and it has been running for 22 years — a play in Jammu on more or less every Sunday of that period, normally at the group's Studio Theatre at Kachi Chawni. In a city where the live-performance calendar is otherwise unpredictable, it is the one fixture you can plan around.
We wrote about how the series works, and how to actually get into the room, here: Every Sunday for 22 Years: Inside Natrang's Free Weekly Theatre in Jammu.
If you have been meaning to go and have not: the barrier is lower than you think, and the programme changes weekly. Purvabhyaas has had its Sunday. There will be another one this week.
Sources: Daily Excelsior — "Natrang stages Hindi play 'Purvabhyaas'"; Rising Kashmir (on an earlier staging of the same play, for the writer, director and plot).
