THE ELUSIVE CHILD
Actors playing children on stage have usually been a bawling, cloying lot. The suspension of disbelief is never really achieved, and the no-neck monsters can be an assault on the senses, grating on the nerves with their high-pitched screechiness. Over the past year however, a bunch of young actors playing children across productions have created characters that remain with us not as little caricatures, but as fully-realised creatures of sensitivity and warmth. There are the toothy twosome from that delightful melodrama, Aaj Rang Hai, Nishi Doshi and Preetika Chawla, who are like little majorettes on stage and are given their fair share of the choicest lines, delivered pithily as only children can. Then Manasi Rachh, in Walking to The Sun, takes us on to a playful journey of little hopes and smaller delights as the terminally ill young boy from Tagore's Dak Ghar. Hers is a performance of lilting beauty.
Then there is Saurabh Nayyar's achievement in Mamtaz Bhai Patang Waale. He leaves behind his gangliness and appropriates a sprightliness of gait peppered with those telling gestures that are never quite tics, that make his performance of a young disaffected adolescent lad, Bikki, one of the finest of this year. In our first ever photo feature at Stage Impressions, we spend some light hearted moments with Saurabh and his two equally irrepressible co-actors from the play, Trimala Adhikari and Ghanshyam Lalsa.
Photographs have been taken by Punit Reddy, a freelance photographer who uses his corporate background in marketing and love of photography to assist and support NGOs across Mumbai.
