A chorus of lament for theatre

The Sahitya Akademi's national seminar on theatre, which discussed the trends in contemporary drama, was a forum for raising issues confronting the genre.Participants, a list of Who's Who,were cryptic in their comments, stripping theatre bare of all its immediacy and excitement, says GOWRI RAMNARAYAN.

"THIS is what the Sangeet Natak Akademi should have done, and every year, but has not bothered to," was the general consensus of appreciative playwrights and theatre directors when the Sahitya Akademi (SA), recognised drama as a major literary genre. It conducted a national seminar on the subject from February 24 to February 26.

It was obvious that SA's K. Satchidanandan and Shivaprakash had put in much thought and effort into the plan, getting people from Kashmir to Tamil Nadu to present an overall view of the major trends and minority attempts in contemporary theatre. They provided a forum for raising issues confronting theatre and its performance at every stage of endeavour. Perspectives included theatre's role in society and politics, native-alien encounters, tradition and modernity and the problems in staging literature.

Participants made a Who's Who of Indian theatre - Vijay Tendulkar, Mahesh Elkunchwar, G. P. Deshpande, Bhisham Sahni, Mahesh Dattani, Chandrasekhar Kambar (playwrights), B. V. Karanth, Mohan Maharishi, Prasanna, Usha Ganguli, M. K. Raina, Moloyshree Hashmi, Ramgopal Bajaj, S. Ramanujam (directors), Zohra Sehgal, Vibha Mishra, C. R. Simha, Narendra Prasad (actors), as also academics and critics like Jancy James, Nemichandra Jain and Samik Bandyopadhyay. The biggest plus point was that the focus never shifted from theatre as performance to theatre as the written text, even in the discussion of theatre as a verbal art form. All three days drew a packed hall, with people standing at the back and crowding the aisles.

And yet, barring some parts, the event dwindled into a barrage of information. The insights were few and far between. Lament was in, analysis was out. Theatre was stripped bare of all its immediacy and excitement.

There were too many speakers, little control by the chair, and no time for a question and answer session. With the circulation of the printed text of their speeches, speakers could have confined themselves to incisive comments on the current scene. But it seemed as if they could never let the mike go. Repeated admonitions from the chair served only to make them sulk. In his session, chairperson B. V. Karanth solved the time problem by letting the speakers take his share of the time. A real loss for the listeners because, within a few moments he made pertinent remarks of experiential wisdom.

Predictably, those who had much to say remained cryptic. You wanted more examples and illustrations from Elkunchwar when he traced his growth towards maturity. "I belong to a region which celebrates the word in the theatre, an unfashionable practice now," he said, adding that this celebration was not indulgence, as he discovered in his strenuous journey. "It took me 30 years to realise the implosive power of austere minimalism. I no longer want to tell, explain, analyse. The fullness of a text depends on incompleteness." Dattani contented himself with a brief introduction, and with reading from his preface to his collected plays.

A sense of defeat was expressed right from the inaugural session. Tendulkar rapped the SA on the knuckles for presenting a glorified, rather than a realistic, picture of the current theatre scene. The brief period in the 1960's when an Indian theatre took significant shape was old history now; those who contributed to it (including himself) had either left the theatre or were merely repeating themselves. Since then, no mind blowing creation had come up except in isolation.

Dr. Shriram Lagoo confessed that after 50 years in the theatre, he had come to realise "the terrible mistake of not bothering to train the audiences, of not including them in our team. That is why there is a big audience today, for mindless plays and cheap farces, but not for meaningful productions". Later, Elkunchwar echoed his sense of defeat. Maharishi too stressed the need to be aware of the fact that theatre was for an immediate audience. It was a mode of interactive, collective team expression in which the audience played a vital part along with the director and actor.

Bandyopadhyay shared this concern. "Theatre has exhausted itself, it does not serve the needs of present day reality," he said, but suggested the way out was for theatre persons to keep themselves charged with life experiences of the most genuine and intense kind, and continue to question insistently, all forms of establishment oriented authority. Because, as Karanth put it later, "We can get information from the media, but to understand it we still need theatre." This must be a theatre of struggle, otherwise what we get is empty ritual.

Ruthless self criticism marked Sahni's discussion of the problems of a novelist's entry into playwrighting, and his discoveries of the limitations of the realistic approach, as also how the weight of research could smother a play.

He endeared himself to listeners by admitting that learning such salutary lessons did not guarantee improvement in practice. He suggested, therefore, that theatre institutions set up workshops to improve the stageworthiness of plays. Later, G. P. Deshpande too was to say that his directors had made him into a playwright.

In Prasanna's terse and reflective commentary, the personal buttressed the general. Describing Indian theatre as a handicapped child of the arts, belonging to 25 languages and more dialects, in folk and amateur theatres, in several States with varying receptivities, and without a critical tradition to nourish it, he described its survival battles after the accident of cinema and the tragedy of television. "But now the problem is not the audiences, they want theatre," he said. "The problem is ourselves, the theatre people." Why look for culture in the janpaths of Delhi? Or believe that culture is accessed by the use of a folk drum or two? Or turn into cultural refugees competing with the spectacles of cinema and TV? Theatre could go back to its ripe old tradition of the subtlest use of the word as exemplified in Kalidasa 2,000 years ago. "The subtle, small theatre is what we always had, and what we should go on having."

Many other problems were touched upon, starting with whether it was possible to have a national theatre in India or whether one should seek that Indianness in distinctly regional expressions.

Vibha Mishra talked about the attrition of acting standards in the theatre whose performers made their living out of TV serials and, in the process, became standardised to insipidity. Others spoke about the need for the actor to enrich him/herself by relishing literature. Sidestream efforts of dalit theatre and revivals of older genres, as also the harnessing of old terms like vakrokti to new needs, found their voices.

The lingering thought came from Ramgopal Bajaj, who read out a contemporary Hindi poem on "Kroorta (Cruelty"), which at once brought Yeats' "Second Coming" to mind. He added that "The pulse of the times we live now beats in this poem. I am searching for the same vibration in modern drama ... I have not found it yet".

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