Reliving childhood stories

When you are transported into a world where characters from Panchatantara, popular children books and cartoons come alive, how exactly would you feel? Watching the musical and interactive play ‘The Clown’s Cry for the Moon!’ on 20 September in Indian Habitat Centre, Metrolife observed, it wasn’t just the children who were left ecstatic, parents followed in their footsteps as well.

Introducing the play, the director-writer VK comes forth and says, “The play is for eight to eighty year-old children and you would just not watch it but enact and sing along with us.” Going by the expressions, the opening statement was quite daunting for everybody watching the play.  They went in with an expectation of sitting back and watching an animated performance but ended up acting on-stage for real.

Giving a flight to our imagination, the play narrates the story of a little girl who is the single child of her working parents. Since she does not have a sibling at home, she uses her imagination as a tool to fill the gap! One fine night when she is out for a walk after dinner she `hears` in her mind the cries of a clown who is so hungry that he is about to gobble up her best friend, the Moon, thinking it to be a delicious round chapatti. The girl begs the clown to spare the Moon and promises to bring him food instead. She gets some food for the clown from her grandmother and with a box in hand she marches out of her house to feed the hungry clown.

In the middle of the journey she encounters a whole lot of characters from books and television such as a scarecrow, humpty-dumpty, superman, monkey and the crocodile and the shrewd fox.  With everyone wanting a share of the delicacies in her box, how does she reach back to the clown makes for an entertaining spectacle.

What is interesting to note is that usually in a performance, heckling or questioning from audience ends up disturbing the performers. In this case, questions were just not invited, the performers changed their dialogues spontaneously to accommodate the reaction of the audience. And by the end when the audience was called out to enact their favourite characters, the entire hall reverberated with sounds of laughter when kids and adults got together to portray their own interpretation of the play, without any script at hand!Did we say, it was daunting in the beginning? It was sheer fun and frolic by the end.