Click to play videoNew Delhi: William Dalrymple’s popular historical travelogue, the City of Djinns, is being staged in the capital starting from Sunday.
If City of Djinns is Will Dalrymple's ode to Delhi then its theatrical adaptation is peeling the same onion of historical layers.
Extremely ambitious in structure and craft, the play has a whopping cast of 50 characters, and a big budget of an approximate Rs 8 lakhs.
That by any standards is a huge amount for a theatrical adaptation in this country, let alone a theatre starved Delhi.
Re-correcting the sights and sounds of 'dilli', ' a landscape of domes, a press of people, a choke of fumes, a whiff of spices" couldn't have been easy.
Tom Alter, who slips into the character of the author must have memorised reams of pages for this one, but is not surprised to see this non-fiction morph effortlessly into a stage avatar.
"It suits itself very well, to theatre because he writes in a dramatic way. His characters are all very dramatic, there is no normal character in this book, the book is extremely theatrical and therefore we have been able to put it into a theatrical form," said Actor Tom Alter.
Two and a half hours of real time, City of Djinns will be a marathon session with a sprawling set at the Indira Gandhi National Centre of Arts.
Being 60 years of Indian independence and 150 years of the mutiny, the timing seems just right to scratch the historical surface of the capital.
But for all the creative itching this young director had, Dalrymple came around only after two months of relentless pursuit.
"He was a little bit hesitant on how I was doing the things, because the events are very interesting, like the qawaali singers, the kabooterbaaz, khalifa, and all these elements of old Delhi, the peers and all the serious thoughts, which are a part of the book, and need a clam and cool audience which will listen to the words, ... so he was a little bit hesitant, but then I convinced him," said City of Djinns Director Rudra Deep Chakrabarti.
What's indeed very convincing is Zohra's Segal's Norah Nickelson, an Anglo Indian who is now seeing not the best of times.
Old memories, a wrinkly face and an unmatchable passion for life – so for Zohra it’s a cakewalk.
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