FREMONT: Naatak, the Bay Area's premier organization dedicated to furthering creative Indian theater, will stage its next play - an adaptation of the well-known classic - Sleuth by Anthony Shaffer - on October 25 and 26 at Cubberley Theater in Palo Alto.
Critically acclaimed as one of the greatest stage thrillers ever written, Sleuth is a tale of two men from different walks of life entangled in a dangerous web of gamesmanship, manipulation, deception and death.
Originally written in 1970, Sleuth has been very popular in the theater circuit the world over. It was subsequently made into a movie of the same name with Oscar-winning performances from Sir Lawrence Olivier and Michael Caine.
Naatak's version of Sleuth has been adapted by director Harish Sunderam Agastya to make it more relevant to Indian American audiences. While most of Naatak's 24 previous productions have been performed in Hindi and Tamil, Agastya has retained English as the language of this play.
"One of Sleuth's scoring points is its wonderfully articulate and witty repartee between the class-conscious Andrew Wyke and the middle-class Milo Tindle. I felt that a lot of the inherent humor in the play would be lost in translation. But many aspects of the play did need to be altered to fit an Indian context." says Agastya.
In Agastya's version of the play, which is set in Mumbai, Andrew Wyke becomes Andrew Furtado, an Anglo-Indian who lives in the upscale Malabar Hill area of the city.
Italian-Jew Milo Tindle becomes Maharashtrian Milind Tindlé, born of a love marriage between a Hindu school principal and a Muslim school teacher.
The Mumbaikar Tindlé runs an Ayurvedic massage clinic now in contrast to the hair-salon run by his namesake in the original.
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