All About ‘The Thing With Feathers’ Directed by Rajat Kapoor
The Thing With Feathers: Quick Details
Play: The Thing With Feathers
Writers: Rabia Kapoor and Chandrachoor Rai
Director: Rajat Kapoor
Production: Aadyam Theatre, Season 8
Cast: Vinay Pathak, Mantra, Neil Bhoopalam, Bhavya Rampal, Waris Ahmed Zaidi, Chandrachoor Rai, Amit Purohit, Radhika Mehrotra, Vidushi Chaddha, Bhagyashree Tarke and Aaraha Mukherjee
Setting: The first half of the 20th century
Genre: Drama / Historical Theatre
There are some plays you watch, applaud, walk out of the theatre, and slowly forget. And then there are plays that follow you home.
The Thing With Feathers belongs firmly to the second kind.
I walked out of the theatre moved, overwhelmed, and, strangely, a little helpless. By the end, I was crying my eyes out. Even now, a part of me feels like it is still sitting inside that theatre, trying to make sense of how a team manages to pull such a heavy subject with such clarity, grandness and perfection.
That, to me, is the mark of phenomenal theatre.
The title comes from Emily Dickinson
I love literary references! The play takes its title from one of Emily Dickinson’s most famous lines: “Hope is the thing with feathers.”
It is a beautiful starting point for a play that spends its entire runtime asking a deceptively simple question: What keeps us hopeful when the world gives us every reason not to be?
Directed by Rajat Kapoor for Aadyam Theatre, The Thing With Feathers looks at the first half of the 20th century through the lives of ordinary people. Written by Rabia Kapoor and Chandrachoor Rai, it moves through a period filled with wars, political upheaval, revolutions, inventions, discoveries, losses and enormous social change.
But this isn’t a history lesson.
The opening scene sets the tale
The opening act itself took my breath away. The play begins with words, quotes, and lines from some of the greatest writers of the century.. almost as though the theatre is gathering the voices of an entire era before the story begins.
It immediately creates a sense of scale. You know you’re about to watch something that is bigger than the individual characters on stage. And yet, what makes the play so powerful is that it eventually does the opposite: it brings that enormous century down to the level of individual human lives.
Two stories unfold simultaneously. Watching these two stories play out alongside each other is one of the most interesting things about the play. You are constantly moving between the personal and the historical, between what is happening to these individuals and what is happening to the world around them.. until a point where the two begin to feel like the same story.
The geo-political references in the play are particularly well placed. A political decision made somewhere far away can change the life of someone who has never even heard of the person who made it.
History, but from a bird's point of view
One of the most fascinating choices in The Thing With Feathers is the use of a bird’s perspective. It was humorous and shameful to think that birds indeed might’ve been looking down, literally and metaphorically, to humans.
We often experience history as a collection of enormous events like World Wars, revolutions, economic collapses, political movements, technological breakthroughs. But history is also made up of people trying to have dinner. People falling in love. People losing someone. People waiting. People hoping. People trying to survive another day while the world outside their window is changing forever.
The bird sees all of this from above.
Also Read: Belly of the Beast: Why Kalki Koechlin’s Play Stayed With Me
Final thoughts: Is The Thing With Feathers worth watching?
Absolutely.
The Thing With Feathers is one of those theatre experiences that reminds you why watching something live on a stage is so different from watching it on a screen. It is intimate, expansive, clever and deeply moving at the same time. At its heart, its is about hope. But it doesn’t tell you that everything will be alright.
In fact, the play seems almost determined to challenge that idea. It leaves you thinking about how much human beings have endured, how much they continue to endure, and how often hope survives in places where it seemingly shouldn’t.
The entire crew brought out the best on stage for us to experience such a magnificent gala evening experience. I am still thinking about the two couples. I am still thinking about the thing with feathers. A part of me is still in that theatre still thinking about the century that passed before us on that stage.
If I have to pin down my favourite thing about the play.. it is that the play doesn’t give you hope as an answer. It gives you hope as a question.
How do we keep finding it?
A beautiful, ambitious and deeply moving piece of theatre. Go for the history. Stay for the stories. And leave with hope.
Must Read: A Room of One’s Own – Why Woolf Needed a Room and Plath’s Figs Still Wither
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