The Luckiest Boy Alive: A play dedicated to children affected by war

The Luckiest Boy Alive: A play dedicated to children affected by war | Mumbai News

BEING CONSIDERED “the luckiest boy alive”, when a young boy survives a massacre by missing the school, can evoke ‘survivor’s guilt’. This is the premise of the play The Luckiest Boy Alive, which is directed by Vikramjeet Sinha and written by Dilsher Dhillon.

The initial draft of the play, which opened on Friday evening at Versova’s Ensemble Studioz, was written by Dhillon after reading an article in December 2014 about the Peshawar school massacre.

A group of terrorists stormed an army-run primary and secondary school, killing 150 people, including 132 schoolchildren.

The article that caught Dhillon’s attention, however, talked about a boy who survived the attack because he didn’t wake up for school that morning as his alarm clock didn’t go off.

“I thought about that boy for days on end and soon realised I needed to write about it. I wrote the first draft of the play in 2015 and kept revising it over the years — sharpening the satire, fine tuning the themes and meta-textual elements. I also worked on the stage directions and visual motifs,” Dhillon recalls.

Though he met Sinha in early 2020 to discuss staging a production of the play, that plan was deferred during the pandemic. After a chance meeting in November, they decided to work on the play.