Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe (Silence! The Court Is in Session) is a Marathi play written by playwright Vijay Tendulkar and first performed in 1967 [1]. The play was written in 1963, for Rangayan, a theatre group, though it was performed much later.
The play was based on a 1956 short-story, ‘Die Panne’ (Traps) by Swiss playwright, Friedrich Dürrenmatt.
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The play has since been translated into some sixteen languages in India and abroad, B.B.C. showed its English version, filmed by Satyadev Dubey [2] Actor-director, Om Shivpuri, directed the Hindi translation of the play as, ‘Khamosh! Adaalat Jaari Hai’. The play had his wife actress, Sudha Shivpuri, in the lead role, and is still considered an important production in the theatre history of India [3].
In it we find a group of teachers who were planning to stage a play in a village. It so turned out that one of the members of the cast did not show up. A local stagehand was asked to replace him. A rehearsal was arranged and a mock trial was staged to make him understand the court procedure. A mock charge of infanticide was leveled against Miss Benare, one of the members of the cast. Then the pretend-play or game suddenly turned into a grim charge and it emerged from the witness that Miss Benare did kill an illegitimate child by Prof. Damle, the missing member of the cast.
Its playwright, Vijay Tendulkar, got national recognition in the form of the ‘Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Award’ for drama in 1970 and "Sangeet Natak Akademi Award (National Academy of Music, Dance and Drama) Award" in 1970 for playwriting.
Noted Marathi playwright and stage director, Satyadev Dubey, directed a Marathi film based on the play, with the same name in 1971. Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe, started the ‘New Cinema’ Movement in Marathi cinema [4], and is still considered one of India’s finest films [5].
It marked the debut of actors Amrish Puri and Amol Palekar [6], and also of Govind Nihalani for whom this was his first film as a full-fledged cinematographer; till then, he had worked an assistant to Guru Dutt’s cinematographer V.K. Murthy [7] Govind Nihalani also co-produced the film with Satyadev Dubey [8]
Lastly, this was also Vijay Tendulkar's first screenplay, who went on to write landmark films like Nishant, Aakrosh, Ardh Satya and Umbartha.