Five men, slumped over each other, hands on chin, are watching a very iconic play, somewhere in south Kerala when smoke surrounds one of them. Cheerani Ravi, the young and sprightly man hit by the smoke, finds himself in a different room, sprinkled with pictures of communists of another era and an alluring bottle of vodka. Two men walk in, speaking a strange language, welcoming Ravi and pouring him a drink of vodka. Ravi identifies one of them as the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who died in 1982. That is when he is told that he has been brought back to the Soviet Union of 1980 and given one task to perform – go back to pre-World War 2 times, and kill Adolf Hitler.
Smoothly, without a lot of noise, Soviet Station Kadavu, touted to be the first Malayalam play that deals with time travel, has begun at the venue of Soorya Ganesham Theatre in Thiruvananthapuram. It is their fifth staging on Sunday, September 25 since it premiered in Kollam in April this year. “Ours was one of the 25 scripts that the Kerala Sangeetha Nataka Akademi selected to fund this year – Rs 1 lakh for the production, Rs 1 lakh for two presentations of it,” says the director of the play, Hazim Amaravila.
For the Sunday show, the open auditorium is packed, and as the lights turn off, the 200-odd people in the audience realise that the devotional songs that they have been listening to at the venue were part of the play within the play. An announcement says that ‘Ningal Enne Communist Aaki’ – the iconic play we mention in the first line – is beginning and the popular drama song ‘Ponnarivaal’ is heard. That’s when the smoke comes, and Cheerani Ravi disappears from the scene.
Actors playing Tesla and Cheerani Ravi
Hazim and team use one main prop for multiple purposes. It becomes a bench, it becomes a time machine, it becomes a home, it becomes a pop-up place (where heads pop-up to surprise the audience). “There were many challenges, of course. We went to artist Sujathan for the sets and he took care of the set. We also had Sujith Rajan, an electrical engineer, to give us all the technical support – including the lights that would tell every different year the time machine goes to,” Hazim says.
You wouldn’t mind the limitations as the performances more than overshadow the technicalities. Amal Krishna as Cheerani Ravi is a marvel waiting to be discovered. He makes Ravi an easily identifiable character in the early scenes – a man without big ambitions but living a cheerful life – and then a transformative figure with every passing stage. Ravi, who goes back in time to save the world from Hitler’s Nazism, actually becomes Hitler by small means of impersonation – in this case, a thick third of a moustache drawn in the middle of the upper lip and a khaki coat worn over his white shirt. “It just shows that there is a dictator inside every one of us. Ravi, who would be a nobody in the times he lived in, finds that he could do a lot if he gets power, and does exactly what Hitler does,” Hazim notes.
Hitler meanwhile, robbed off his late 20s and 30s, emerges as a confused looking young man in 2022, watching what’s left of the drama (Ningal Enne Communist Aaki) that Ravi had left behind. It is a hilarious scene and Kannan Nayar playing the grownup Hitler is a joy to watch.
The base story can bring reminders of other fiction. The drama itself is based on a short story by Murali Krishnan. But there are similarities you can draw, from Stephen Fry’s novel Making History in which a young man and a scientist collaborate together to go back in time and cancel the birth of Hitler. In the novel, it works, but then creates an alternate universe which is just as bad. In the drama, none of the attempts to change the history of the world succeeds. You see different versions of Cheerani Ravi who goes back in time with the same mission and returns unsuccessful. You get a whiff of the transformation of the Cheerani Ravi you have been watching, when you see how he treats his “predecessors.”
“If you ask people what they would change about this world if they could go back a hundred years, 80% of the time you will hear the answer that they will kill Hitler,” Hazim says. Even Murali Krishnan’s story is largely revised in the adaptation. Hazim also adds parallels to the present times India lives in, sometimes making explicit humorous references to the current regime. “Perhaps because we have played only in Kerala, we haven’t received a negative reaction to all those references,” Hazim says.
It has to be also because the play is so well made. Two hours of Soviet Station Kadavu go by without you noticing it. That’s how engaging Hazim’s script is. The women characters are few – Reshma, who plays multiple characters and is behind the very convincing costumes, and Naveena, who plays Eva Braun, Hitler’s lover and later wife. The hero of the story is undoubtedly Amal Krishna, who makes the transition from the everyday funny character we all would be familiar with, to one of the most feared dictators of all time with remarkable ease. All the actors are from the drama troupe, Kanal Samskarika Vedhi.