EXCLUSIVE: After OMG Oh My God and 102 Not Out, Umesh Shukla's acclaimed play Madhuri vs Dixit to be made into a film

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Umesh Shukla has been a popular name among Gujarati audiences for several years and since 2012, he has also enjoyed nationwide popularity. That was the year when OMG Oh My God, an adaptation of his cult Gujarati play Kanji Viruddh Kanji, was made as a Bollywood film. Starring Paresh Rawal and Akshay Kumar, the devotional courtroom drama emerged as a sleeper super-hit. Six years later, he made 102 Not Out (2018), an adaptation of the Gujarati play of the same name. The film adaptation, starring Amitabh Bachchan and Rishi Kapoor, was also a success. And now, Umesh Shukla is all set to adapt yet another of his acclaimed plays for the big screen – Madhuri vs Dixit. Madhuri vs Dixit is a Hindi play and its premiere took place on April 26 in Mumbai. Interestingly, it was earlier staged in Gujarati, with the title Madhuri Dixit. It stars Riddhi Shukla and Jaideep Shah in leading roles. Interestingly, the former is also the wife of Umesh Shukla. Unnati Gala and Harshad Patel feature in suppor...
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‘It’s like Game of Thrones!’ The return of India’s ancient superhero fantasy epic

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In the 1980s, Peter Brook’s adaptation of The Mahabharata enchanted audiences on stage and screen. As Brook’s son presents a restored print at the Venice film festival, he and his team discuss the work’s extraordinary journey

When Antonin Stahly was nine years old, his mother took him to the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris to see a production of the ancient Indian epic The Mahabharata, which translates loosely as “the great story of mankind”. More than 20 actors from 16 countries performed on a stage steeped in red earth and scarred by a water-filled trench; fire also played a leading role. Directed by Peter Brook, whom the RSC founder Peter Hall called “the greatest innovator of his generation”, and adapted by Luis Buñuel’s former co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière, this spectacular Mahabharata weighed in at nine hours, plus intervals. Even at that length, it represented a massive compression of its source text, which runs to 1.8m words. Brook and Carrière’s version has been likened to summarising the Bible in 40 minutes.

Audiences could devour The Mahabharata in three parts over successive evenings or as an all-day weekend marathon; in some outdoor venues, such as the limestone quarry in Avignon where the production premiered in 1985, it began at dusk and climaxed just as the dawn sun lit up the sky. Stahly saw it in a single noon-to-midnight sitting. “It was like a superhero fantasy,” he says, still sounding awestruck. “It had Bhima, the strongest man on Earth, and Bhishma, who has the power to live for ever. Arjuna was the best warrior. And then there were all the gods. It was amazing for me, because I’m half Indian, but I wasn’t brought up in an Indian context.”

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