The Manganiyar Seduction at the Dublin Theatre Festival

Direct from the deserts of Rajasthan, the Festival is delighted to welcome the most colourful, joyous and inspiring show likely to be seen this year.

To be honest, if you’d told me what The Manganiyar Seduction at the Gaiety Theatre was going to be - or had tried to describe it to me - I’d have said “Ah, no, thanks very much though.”

So I’ll describe it for you. It’s over 40 Indian males sitting in a big grid lit by light bulbs, some playing stringed instruments, some beating drums, none of them really dancing and a lot of them singing and chanting. For two hours. In Indian.

What do you think? Sound like your sort of thing?

I’ll tell you though - it’s fantastically brilliant. It started so so simply and basically and rises to this huge celebration of passion, of words, of music and of rhythm. Just magical.

It started out like this - one man just playing a stringed instrument and another man singing:

It ended like this -

The audience clapping and whooping, many on their feet to applaud what they’d just seen, even if the vast majority didn’t understand it.

The show, originally created for the opening of the 2006 Dehli Fim Festival groups over 40 musicians from the Managaniyar gypsy tribe, a caste of traditionally Muslim musicians who played to royalty. Their songs tell their story and heritage and are about birth, life, death and marriage, or as the Dublin Theatre Festival website put it far better

… in this unique show, they weave together their deeply rooted and complex history in a rousing array of choreography, song and rhythm, building to a breathtaking climactic finale.

The red back-drop, based on the red light district in Amsterdam is like a giant music box - you never know what’s going to come through the curtain - at times it reminded me of a giant Advent calendar or the set of Blankety-Blank.

The use of the lighting was fantastic - allowing us to see who was playing clearly and to almost follow the conversational flow of the music, the prayer and the chanting. All I can tell you about is the passion, the enthusiasm and the focus each of the singers and musicians had - the way they held their hands, the may they beseeched the audience and appealed to the heavens, the sheer energy from them and around them and because of them was breathtaking.

I was so surprised at my own feelings at the end. It took a while for me to warm to it but I did and went and bought the CD - can’t put it much better than that. While I’ve since heard that others walked out, not getting it or liking it - and it is very very different to anything I had ever seen before - I’m so glad I had the opportunity to be there and we left on a buzz, with many questions between us and a lot to talk about.

The Theatre festival website says

It will blow you away because you’ll never have experienced anything quite like The Manganiyar Seduction before, and you may never see anything like it again.

and that is very true. I cannot think of a show that has surprised me as much in quite a long time. A big thanks to Stiofáin for the gift of the tickets. Excellent way to open the Festival.