This was Vijay Tendulkar’s ‘Gidhade’, translated into English as ‘Vultures’ by Priya Adarkar. Alyque had been mesmerised by the great Marathi actor Shriram Lagoo and his performance in the original version.

A terrific vehicle, he thought, for Kabir Bedi in English. It should knock our audiences flat. But he was grotesquely mistaken. In spite of months of rehearsals, trying to capture the flavour of English spoken as Marathi (including not only Marathi inflections and intonations in the voice, but also the body language of Marathi speech), the drama turned into camp! Vultures did all right at the box office thanks to Kabir Bedi’s fame as a movie actor, but artistically it was a lead balloon. As the Americans say, “It was dead in the water.”

Fun Facts : Back in the late 60s/early 70s, a writer by the name of Priya Adarkar was absorbed in translating some plays of Vijay Tendulkar from Marathi to English. One of these plays was GIDHADE, which she translated as THE VULTURES. Soon after, she invited some of the leading lights of the English-language theatre to her home to hear a reading of it. Alyque and Gerson da Cunha were there; so was Partap Sharma, who had agreed to do a solo reading of the play.

The reading went off well, but the reaction wasn’t positive to the idea of staging it. In fact, Gerson said that Maharashtrians didn’t use such abusive language!  She swallowed her disappointment and went ahead with plans for publishing the text and a few years later she was delighted to hear that Alyque had decided to produce the play.

The performances were well received. It was an early example of a modern Indian-language play done in English. It benefited greatly from the professionalism brought to it, all thanks to Alyque!