‘Barff’: Saurabh Shukla’s thrilling play draws inspiration from Kashmir

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Barff, a play written and directed by national award-winning actor Saurabh Shukla, is set in Kashmir—however, it is not connected with the politics of the region. The inspiration lies in the people and landscapes.

During his travels in Srinagar, Shukla discovered something awe-inspiring in its locales. “I came across small villages with beautiful houses, but nobody lived there. I was told that during the insurgency, everyone had left— it was a ghost village.

It lent an aura of mystery to the place, and it is for this reason that I set the play in Kashmir." The sets are integral to the play, almost like characters in their own right. “Ashvin Gidwani, the producer, said it gets difficult to travel with a heavy set and so we decided to adapt the sets according to the place we were staging it," says Shukla. In one of their productions in the US, for instance, they performed on a basketball court.

“We played with haze and smoke as the play is set in a heavily snowing Kashmir. The basketball court was quite cold and chilly, and there was a natural ball of fog that lingered like a cloud—this was magical for us," he adds. Also read: Planner: 6 events to jazz up your week Even though the play is not political, Shukla maintains that humans are never really free from the politics of the land, and that it is up to the audience to interpret it as per what they understand Revolving around the story about a doctor held captive by parents desperate to find help for their ill child, Barff’s central theme explores the question of what constitutes ‘truth’.