Staging Siachen: Survival drama, from the world’s highest battlefield to Mumbai’s Prithvi Theatre

Rehearsal of the play 'Siachen' in Prithvi Theatre, with (seated in the centre) the veteran Makarand Deshpande (in blue), Zahan Kapoor (in white) and Aditya Rawal (in black).

Aditya Rawal, actor and writer, was last seen in Hansal Mehta’s film Faraaz, and Anahita Uberoi’s play As Bees in Honey Drown. But, if his words and experience are to go by, he’s hardly the new kid on the block. Aditya, actor Paresh Rawal’s son, studied devised theatre and performance at the London International School of Performing Arts (Lispa) and proceeded to bag an MFA in dramatic writing from the Tisch School of Arts, New York University. He has had experience in screenwriting, acting, and is now set to premier Siachen, a play he wrote during the pandemic.

With him, through the journey of Siachen, and during this interview, is collaborator and friend Zahan Kapoor, Shashi Kapoor’s grandson who also featured in Faraaz. They are co-producers who finish each other’s sentences and seem quite inseparable. We are seated in the green room in Mumbai’s Mithibai College, their rehearsal space as they prepare to mount a production that’s ambitious, in both content and scale.

Rawal, during his time in NYC, started to write Siachen as an ‘anti-war play’. But, as he expanded his reading list, new and interesting facets of this battlefield atop a glacier emerged. His deep interest in history and geopolitics kept him hooked. “I was always interested in the stats about Siachen; the highest, coldest battlefield, unhabitable heights. But what really hooked me eventually was the fact that nobody wants to be there. There has been no bullet fired on this battlefield for the last 20 years. Lives and money are spent to hold on to a place that nobody really wants. It is a tragedy of the human condition. Every conflict comes from mistrust. That breeds fear and fear drives us in many ways,” says Rawal.

His process is journalistic and includes a lot of research as a means of ‘feeling secure in the world’. Here, it involved speaking to locals and mountaineers and a visit to the region to understand and inhabit the terrain. “But when I start writing I put that (the research) aside. At the end of the day, this is a piece of dramatic writing and at that point, I need to service the craft,” Rawal says.

The drama

A human story in the form of survival drama is at the centre of the play set in this treacherous region. A blizzard strikes three months after three Indian soldiers have been posted on the glacier. It washes everything away and they lose communication to the base. “It may as well be that they are the only people alive in the world. The days that follow put them to the test. Through the course of the play, we learn if and how they hold on to their lives, beliefs, and sanity. Or if the glacier will have the final say,” explains Rawal, adding that ‘Siachen here, is the world, the enemy, and the antagonist.’

Kapoor is quick to point out that it is almost primal in nature, like tales from the days of yore. “There is a near-primal, mythical aspect of the story. The earliest stories of mankind deal with floods, cataclysms, and mass migrations,” he says.

Mounting a spectacle

Siachen, quite like the region’s topography, could not have been an easy play to mount. Rawal and Kapoor both realised that they needed an experienced director and legendary Makarand Deshpande came on board. Written in English, it was translated by Raghav Dutt and has a six-member cast that includes Niketan Sharma, Jatin Sarin, Rohit Mehra, Chitransh Pawar, Seerat Mast, and Zahan Kapoor. Production and set design are by Shaira Kapoor (Zahan’s sister) who has previously worked on films like Bombay Velvet (2015) and Gully Boy (2019) and web-series the A Suitable Boy (2020).

“It might not be photo-realistic, but she’s done a great job of creating the world on a small budget. The set-heavy approach makes it less portable. So, we’ve kept that minimal but gone realistic on the costumes designed by Pallavi Patel,” says Rawal.

Both insist that it is the make-believe world of theatre that enables a place less imagined to come alive. “It’s accessible to do on stage. Achieving a glacial landscape in a film would cost a lot. On stage, we can tell an intimate story set against this backdrop. But the challenge is always to create an environment; the sense of cold, the blizzard. Here, an abstraction, a suggestion, make-believe, the utterance of something, can conjure up an image,” Kapoor chimes in.

Stories, above all

Rawal and Kapoor may have by now straddled both mediums and different roles, but identify as storytellers first. “At the end of the day, we are servicing a craft. Like a sport, we work on our skills and go play the game,” say Kapoor and Rawal almost in unison.

Rawal is hopeful that the play will leave the audience with some questions and a deeper understanding of the human condition and things we are resigned to. It does, however, not come at the cost of being parabolic.

They have no moralistic or other delusions and, above all, they want the audience to sit through an engaging piece of drama.

“We can talk about the purpose of art till the cows come home. But it is a privilege to be involved in something that is servicing a collective experience and reinforcing the fact that stories matter. Whether they matter for some profound reason or if they are just an essential part of living, we need stories,” Kapoor says, summing it up for us.

Siachen will premiere on June 15, followed by shows on June 16, 17, and 18, at Prithvi Theatre, Mumbai