MUMBAI: MAHARASHTRA

The Next Stage

A stately living room transformed into a makeshift stage with painted backdrops, borrowed props and portable lights. The audience sprawled on the floor or propped up by cushions. And to end the evening, a round of discussion, poetry reading and impromptu music sessions. Theatre is certainly going places. To residences in Mumbai, for instance, and creating mini dramas of the unintended sort: actors confusing the entries for exits, tripping over rolled-up carpets and stacked furniture, even reacting unconsciously to noises emanating from other rooms. But no complaints, didn't Shakespeare himself say the whole world was a stage?

Alternative venues have given drama in the city a new energy. "It introduces theatre to a new audience in a comfortable environment," says Atul Kumar, founder of Company Theatre, which started the trend. Kumar organises plays twice a month with wife Sheela Chadha. His group's repertoire of 10 Hindi and English works includes one-act plays like Moliere's The Jealous Husband and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. No mean achievement for a group that doesn't have a regular cast, only a floating population of theatre, TV and film professionals.

Tired of being bogged down by problems like the non-availability of dates, high rentals and depressingly low audience turnout at most auditoriums, a growing tribe of performers is moving away from the confines of regular halls. Private bungalows and apartments, dilapidated godowns, boutiques and art galleries are not beyond the creative grasp of these actors. It is ingenuity born more of compulsion than choice in a city where the premium on space is high.

And it can be a big challenge, as the Industrial Theatre Company found out when it recently staged Macbeth in the starkness of the ramshackle Phoenix Mill godown. Recreating Scotland on a stage pockmarked with the rubble of corrugated sheets, pipes and the odd water closet wasn't easy. But enthusiasm won out. "We were just four fellows who wanted to put up a play," explains Rehaan Engineer, Industrial's director. Agamemnon, the group's maiden venture, had been staged in the Sakshi Art Gallery.

Kumar claims his group's performances have met with a tremendous response. With news getting around, over 80 people have lined up to provide him their houses for performances. Most of them come from the well-heeled sections of Mumbai. Company Theatre has held performances at the homes of actor Rajit Kapoor, director Manjul Sinha, writer Sanjeev Sharma and historian Shanta Gokhale.

Theatre at home, no doubt, will help stage actors to expand base but finances are another matter. The Company Theatre, for instance, spends at least Rs 2,000 per performance to hire and cart lights and props to the venue. With no tickets involved, the perennially cash-strapped groups pass around a fund box at the end of the performance and hope for the best. Theatre group Aasth calls it the "pay as you like" system. The collections have been, at best, moderate. So the onus of managing finances remains with the actors who have come to rely heavily on sponsorships. Says Nadir Khan, co-founder of Q Theatre Productions, about Thespo 2000, a youth theatre festival held last year: "We had 15 plays from all over the country waiting to be auditioned, jam sessions, stand-up acts and young college students who had rehearsed during exams, classes and holidays. But we had no money to support them till a corporate finally bailed us out."

"It is exciting to discover new places to perform and experiment with style and form even if the material is not new," says director-actor Lilette Dubey of the "youngsters" who have taken the alternative route. But fellow director Rahul da Cunha is not as indulgent. "I feel there is far too much arrogance and not enough new work. I don't hear a fresh voice," he says. There is criticism also that the unconventional venues have taken away the ambience and form of true theatre, rendering the audience a "lazier" lot. But the new tribe is dismissive. To them, the moot question is that of building an audience base, not influencing a non-existent one.