Delighted to receive the Sultan Padamsee Award 2020 for my play Undaunted. Second time I've picked this award up, I won it in 2011 for Ultimate Kurukshetra. Thoroughly enjoyed this short little extract from the first draft of the piece.
My reaction was to promptly schedule some time to redraft the script. Sigh! As a playwright one does not write a play, one rewrites it!
Undaunted: Synopsis
A passenger stranded aboard a quarantined cruise ship tries to spin a yarn. The ship’s steward though, seems to be spending way too much time on the internet. The story feels like a blast from the past.
February 1946: The steam ship SS Undaunted enroute to Bombay is unable to make landfall as the city and country are in the midst of an insurrection, the Royal Indian Navy uprising. Clandestine actions on the deck reveal five people with hidden pasts embroiled in a mysterious operation.
Nadia a sultry film-star, Roshan a suave banker, and the enigmatic Mira draw the attention of Jai, a cop with a violent streak. Ibrahim, a lascar, has been sailing on steamers for forty years. He wants to go home.
Starting at the cusp of India’s Independence, and at the close of World War 2, the deck of the Undaunted opens out into the intricate tapestry of maritime India in the first half of the twentieth century. The zig-zag journey of characters between Madras and Penang, Bombay and Aden, London and Durban, intersect with iconic moments in the lives of Indian political thinkers, and the glitzy world of cinema.
With a nod to the noir genre, Undaunted propels us into a vivid dreamscape, where journeys are made over water and discoveries are made in the deep.
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