CENTRESTAGE

A whole new generation of playwrights gets set to rule the stage-and this time in English. India Today's Nirmala Ravindran reports.

Talk of the Indian stage invariably leads to discussions on the growth of Indian drama, which has almost become synonymous with "written texts". After all, directors and actors come and go, but Shakespeare remains.

While Bharatamuni's Natyashastra is still regarded as the mother of all theatre-instruction manuals (with a greater canvas than both Brecht and Stanislavski!), is surprising that the last two decades have only thrown up the sporadic bright spark when it comes to playwrights. At a time when the Indian stage is bursting at the seams with new directors, actors, musicians and even scenographers, the only area that (and what many would consider the most important) has seen a void is playwriting.

Sample this: Every year at Thespo-the Youth Theatre Competitions and Festival, there are nearly a hundred new entrants to the world of theatre, while most of them comprise actors, drectors and tchnicians (llight and sound) the writers are invariably missing.

"We are always looking for new scripts, but we can't make that mandatory because there just aren't enough people writing for the
stage," says Quasar Thakore Padamsee of Thespo. Academics continue
to argue that this is merely a reflection of the times that we live in.

"We must understand that theatre is no longer the only means of entertainment available to the population," says Theatre director and former director of the National School of Drama S. Prasanna who stresses on the various avenues open to a writer today, of which theatre is only one of them. While Kalidasa and Bhasa immortalised the Sanskrit era, Tagore set the tone for theatre in pre-independent India. The emergence of Mohan Rakesh and Dr Dharamvir Bharti as the most important playwrights in Independent India was followed by dominance of the trio-that are considered the most influential and well known playwrights that shaped Modern Indian Theatre-Girish Karnad, Vijay Tendulkar and Badal Sircar.

The plays written in this period like Evam Indrajit, Nagamandala and Sakharam Binder continue to dominate the Indian stage to this day with Karnad, Kambar, Tendulkar and Sircar's work spreading across the country thanks to Translations in various Indian Languages as well as in English.

Notwithstanding the success of several important theatrical productions across the country the lacuna in the area of writing for stage has been felt acutely in the last two decades. "Why should any young person today write plays?" asks Karnad. " It's a thankless job, firstly you might never see your play staged, secondly you will never earn a livelihood from writing for the stage, and thirdly with the life that we lead in the metros today, who can blame people if they don't come to the theatres to watch plays. So if his choices are writing for stage, television or films, only a great obsession for the stage would make him choose to write for stage," he reasons.

Self-sustenance is only one of the many reasons for the lacuna, the other, and considered most predominant has been language. The new language of the new generation in the metros and smaller towns in India is emerging as English. Having lost the superior command over the vernacular that was available to the previous generation, English seems to have taken over as the new vernacular. While English playwrights have been few and far in between till recently the notable exception has been Mahesh Dattani whose plays on social, moral and gender conflicts found not just audiences but also readers when published as texts. While 'English Theatre' was largely considered elitist till recently, associated as it was with the Queens English and put on British accents, the last decade has witnessed a spurt of adaptations(I'm not Bhaji Rao) or original plays Tara(Mahesh
Dattani) on the Indian Stage.

While translations are still considered the best option to bring language theatre to an English-speaking audience, original plays are on the rise in many of the cities especially in Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore. Dattani can be credited with being a fore runner in the field of play writing in English along with Gurcharan Das, Manjula Padmanabhan and a handful of others. Dattani was the first Indian playwright writing in English to be awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1998 for "Final Solutions and other plays". The last 10 years has seen many more playwrights making a mark on the National Stage albeit in the English language, prominent among them is Rama Ramanathan whose Mahadevbhai and Cotton 56, Polyester 84(translated in Hind and Marathi by Chetan Datar) have been performed successfully across Maharashtra and won critical acclaim. But, like Ramanathan says, "I have never done theatre for money. I have done it to share an idea or a thought."

While playwrights had to wait for decades to be published (if at all) till a few decades ago, Vijay Nair (Bangalore) and Gautam Raja (currently living in the US) are two recent Playwrights who have been
published in English in the recent past. A shot in the arm to
budding playwrights in English has been the Writer's Bloc playwriting workshop and festival put together by Rage, a theatre group in Mumbai in association with The British Council. The two workshops have thrown up nearly 20 new and original scripts, the majority of which are in English. . "

Of course, the initial deal was to only do playwriting workshops and that was to originally be the end of the project, but we really could not handle the fact that these scripts that had been written at the workshop may never get produced, may just gather dust in drawer, which was when we came up with the idea of Writers' Bloc...the festival,"
says actor Shernaz Patel who along with Rahul Da Cunha and Rajit Kapoor put the festival together in association with mentors Carl Miller and Phyllis-playwrights from Royal Court Theatre London. While most of the new plays might never have a run beyond the festival, there are some plays that see multiple shows thanks to the efforts of a committed director. "Rahul wrote and directed the Pune Highway for the first workshop in 2004, we are still running the play . It performed at the Biennale in Bonn in Germany and we have shows in Amsterdam and Antwerp lined up."

This year's selection of 12 plays performed at both Prithvi Theatre as well as NCPA Experimental in Mumbai is also expected to travel to Bangalore to showcase the works of the Bangalore-based writers. From Turel-set in conflict ridden Manipur, written by debutant playwright Swar Thounaojam, 26, to Crab-a young play about urban lives and relationships written by now considered veteran 24-year old Ram Ganesh Kamatham-the 12 plays written at the workshop spanned genres and the young playwrights, most of whom are in their twenties refuse to be slotted or stone walled into categories.

Making more Indian language scripts accessible to an English-speaking audience today is not considered an elitist concept anymore but a necessary function to keep the current generation of theatre practitioners as well as audience engaged with the medium. Which explains the latest project grant from Sri Ratan Tata Trust to Ranga Shankara a two-year old theatre in Bangalore-to engage writers, translators and artists in the task of translating a set of plays or texts from Indian Languages to English. Led by Dr. Arshia Sattar the workshop will comprise of some of the biggest names in their respective fields. "The aim of the workshop is to focus on making scripts across languages accessible to both theatre people as well as the public," says Dr Sattar.

As for hardliners who still crib about English being a foreign language and not suited to the Indian stage, 33-year-old playwright Gautam Raja puts it best when he says; "Not for me, it's my only language and if I have to write it can only be in English." And the Indian stage is only richer for it.

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