BWW Reviews: AADAB MANTO SAHEB Brings Museum Theatre, A Unique Story Telling Form to Delhi

Storytelling has been the oldest, most effective form of entertainment as well as engagement for humans since times immemorial. And now, a new performance just concluded in the capital added a unique touch to the art of story telling on stage. Museum Theatre, a stage play served as an interesting concept that has just been introduced in the capital. The new play Aadab Manto Saheb, was staged on Museum Theatre style of story telling this weekend in Delhi. The unique and rarely performed style of theatre was staged to a small discerning audience in the city.

The play comprised a solo performance of Saadat Hasan Manto's most famous play Toba Tek Singh was a collage of short stories. Stories by renowned writer Saadat Hasan Manto who has been immortalized by his works not just in India but also in the subcontinent and around the world.

Directed by Kamal Pruthi in Museum Theatre Style, Toba Tek Singh has apparently never ever been performed in solo format. The play provided a unique theatre experience where 18 characters are performed alone by Kamal Pruthi himself. Toba Tek Singh and other stories of Manto have been dramatized by several Indian and Pakistani theatre directors but rarely produced in their rawness and as it is it, without any additional cosmetic effect thereby showing the true picture of partition.

Manto was also a film and radio scriptwriter, and journalist. In his short life, he published twenty-two collections of short stories, one novel, five collections of radio plays, three collections of essays, two collections of personal sketches.

Manto was tried for obscenity half-a-dozen times, thrice before 1947 and thrice after 1947 in Pakistan, but never convicted. Some of his works have been translated in other languages

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