SAMAADHI: Bridge House Theatre

crew

producer - Mohit Mathur & Ivantiy Novak

director - Timothy Trimingham Lee

writer - Ivantiy Novak

choreographer - Mohit Mathur

cast

The Indian - Mohit Mathur

Reginald Dyer - Ivantiy Novak

the project

Set against the backdrop of the British Raj in India, the story follows two tourists through Jallianwala Bagh as they are haunted by the ghosts of the 1919 massacre. 

Written partly in Onegin stanza, and partly in Berkoff’s free verse, this was a heavily stylised piece that explored identity, trauma and colonialism through the eyes of 21st century expats. Together with Mohit we began the process by exploring the concepts physically, moving in the space and reacting intuitively to triggers consisting of historical images and text. We planted our impulses on paper, refined movement and gradually worked our way into finding the voices of our characters. 

I formulated the material into narrative text, after which we brought aboard our director Timothy Trimingham Lee, and explored the piece further with him. 

Clowning and movement was used to work through a non-linear, fragmented narrative, as well as a vast array of characters. In writing the piece, I drew heavily on primary source material consisting of original eyewitness accounts and archival British reports, as well as literary material such as The Anarchy by William Dalrymple, The Patient Assassin by Anita Anand, An Indian Summer by James Cameron, Letters from a Father to His Daughter by Jawaharlal Nehru and Ants Among Elephants by Sujatha Gidla. 

cherry picks

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ «it was a moving performance of skillful mime, poems and movement to interpret and convey the atrocities of a massacre an act of genocide. Words alone can be sterile at times or banal as we read every day about large scale disregard for human life. The strength in the bodies of the performers and the strength of their message made me empathize with the children who were not allowed to have a future, neither their parents, grandparents, friends, cousins and so on who were there to ironically say in a peaceful way: Enough is Enough!» - Anastasia for Audience Club.

★ ★ ★ ★ «using a variety of performance techniques, we were taken through the build up, the actual events and the aftermath of the massacre - from all different sides. This production could so easily have been very pretentious and 'worthy', but I didn't find it so at all. It was actually quite challenging, which is not a bad thing and I left wanting to find out more about these events. I feel that both Mohit and Ivantiy are definitely names to look out for in the future» - Sandra for Audience Club.

«Samaadhi explores the horror of that event  and reflects on colonial policy from a number of angles. And part of the aim is to make the appalling events of 1919 better known. We meet an old man remembering. We see early silent film actors discovering bullet holes in a wall. We hear the poetic, chilling rhetoric of the officer in charge and we watch a lot of shooting and dying. It’s pretty uncompromising, visceral  theatre for grown ups... Novak, who wrote the play, has a quality of eloquent stillness and attentive listening which I found compelling. And he has one of the most attractive speaking voices I’ve heard in a young actor for a very long time» - Susan Elkin for Susan Elkin Reviews.