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Playing It Right

Who says Indian theatre is dying? Playwrights--both veteran and budding--in the country had a chance to interact with those from the Royal Court Theatre, London, at its first residency workshop in Bangalore recently. It was a fortnight of enrichment, concludes Principal Correspondent Stephen David.

On any other day gastroenterologist Ganesh Pai from Kasturba Hospital in Manipal, near Mangalore, would have been in his clinic attending on patients. But today Pai is facing a computer screen, keying in fresh lines on a Pentium III at the picturesque 30-acre Ecumenical Christian Centre campus near Bangalore. He is one of the 11 Indian and two Sri Lankan budding playwrights attending the first of its kind Indian Playwriting Residency (Jan 14 to 28) conducted by the Royal Court Theatre (rct), London.

Playwrighting is all about playing it right, says Pai, a theatre enthusiast who teamed up with some of the best names in theatre from London on the two-week programme. Pai, along with the thirteen other participants who are 18 to 60 years old, have been coached on all aspects of the craft of writing plays by a three-member team from rct, the flagship of new writing and home of the theatrical avant garde in Britain. With premieres of the works of Harold Pinter, Athol Fugard and Ariel Dorfman among others, the rct is among one of the world's leading contemporary theatres. Since 1989, the rct has collaborated with emerging playwrights and directors from all parts of the world.

We have developed playwriting networks in Uganda, Russia and Palestine as well but this is the first time we are in south Asia, says Elyse Dodgson, associate director of rct and founderdirector of the Royal Court International Residency. Now in its thirteenth year, the International Residency has become a springboard for international play development projects. RCT's programme in London last year drew participants from 22 different countries.

The seed for the first Indian residency workshop was sown by Bangalore playwright Mahesh Dattani whose play Bravely Fought the Queen drew RCT's attention when it was staged in UK five years ago. Says Dodgson, We found a refreshing energy in Indian-English theatre and decided to embark on a long-term relationship with the Indian playwrights. This led to a dialogue with Artistes Repertory Theatre (art) established in 1982 by Bangalore's theatre couple Jagdish Raja and Arundhati for the January 2001 residency in Bangalore made possible with support form the British Council.

Dattani, arguably India's most famous playwright in English who also took a session at the RCT workshop, says The Indian writing scene is bursting with talent, a workshop like this will help boost the English playwriting scene.

Delon Weerasinghe, 22, a broadcast journalist from Sri Lanka, says the workshop opened his eyes to the discipline of playwrighting. I had to rework the draft of my new script called Dieu Bill because of the inputs from the rct experts, he says, obviously excited at striking new synergies at the fortnight long residential programme. This workshop has demystified the theory of playwriting and this is important for someone like me who has no academic background. A copy of Martin Crimp's The Country sits on his table as he works on his notes with fellow participant Anushka Ravishankar, an editor for Tara Publishing in Chennai who is embellishing her work-in-progress Manuscript in the Mail. It helps to bounce ideas off each other, she adds.

Ravishankar and others are coached by playwright April De Angelis, one of Britain's highly regarded new writers who is also director of studies for the M.A. in playwriting at the University of Birmingham. It is all about exploiting the raw energy which is in plenty here, says April, we are just guides stepping in and out of the budding playwright's mind. Dominic Cooke, associate director of RCT and the director of an ongoing play in England Spinning Into Butter by Rebecca Gilman (a new play which probes racism in a white liberal college) was the other expert who sat through the sessions that covered topics like writing skills, structure, dialogue, character and image/setting. They were also shown a German production in English of Henry V.

The second week was devoted to participants' works. Chandrashekar Kambar, famous Kannada playwright, was also invited to address the group and predictably he stressed the need to write plays in one's mother tongue. Says Nicholas Bernard Kharkongor, 26, from Nagaland, who has staged his play To Each His Own at Delhi's India Habitat Centre last September, What we learnt here was the art and craft of playwriting with the goal of producing professionally competitive scripts. Now working on a new play, Come As You Were, Khargkongor avers, Talks on craft issues like voice, structure, format, submission techniques, and the play development process were crucial for me. Every word was analysed. What it meant in terms of the scene, the act and how essential it was for the play.

The Indian-English theatre scene in India is still confined to a few cities like Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore and sponsors are hard to come by according to Kharkongor who had to struggle to keep his show afloat. So it is helpful to know from our British friends how full-time theatre workers there eke out a living.

Playwriting is an aural craft; the ear is more important than the eye, says Cooke, who dialogued extensively with participants. We critiqued their writings and honed their skills in the limited time that we had. Ninaz Khodaiji, 31, from Mumbai, had extended sessions with April as she discussed her work-in-progress Glass Houses. We used to write without a method. Here, for the first time, we delved into scene, plot, climaxes and reversals, says Khodaiji who has scripted plays titled Charivari and Close Quarters.

Vivek Tandon from Mumbai says that he did not agree with all that the rct folks were saying but he felt that the workshop will help him give some more punch to his work-in-progress Love, Sex and a Marriage for Seven Lifetimes. But the youngest participant Ram Ganesh Kamatham, 18, from Bangalore's Christ College who has staged his work Arcana: The Secret of Catharsis at a recent college competition says that he has already developed ideas for a new play thanks to the workshop. There is a lot of technicality involved in writing plays, he says, Earlier I thought one-dimensionally but now I now I have learnt to think three-dimensionally which lends a new dynamism to the scenes. Delhi teacher Hira Kartar, 60, the oldest participant who says she felt young at the workshop. I hope to complete my work on the last of a trilogy based on children, says Kartar, and it is nice to bounce off ideas with other writers. As awareness of literary technique becomes more developed, so does the sense of our own subjects and voice.

By the end of the year, at least five of the plays that were written at the workshop will be staged in Bangalore by art,
says its founder Jagdish Raja. Art has staged over forty major productions and adaptations of plays by American, British and European playwrights.

Says Elyse Dodgson, impressed by the abundant talent in India, We see this as a beginning of a long-term exchange between Indian and British writers. The first phase would help create an environment for a minimum of 12 writers to develop their plays within the next six months. After which there will be a week of readings at the Royal Court and, hopefully, this will lead to a full production of at least one of the plays. If Indian novelists have made it big outside I am sure Indian playwrights writing in English can too, asserts Dodgson. Amen.

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