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Literary Review
THEATRE
Initial dialogues
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Around the world, playwrights are in search of an audience. GOWRI RAMNARAYAN was there in New Delhi when they met to discuss their craft and their very different contexts.
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SEMINARS on theatre usually bring academics together, or theatre directors to explicate their work. A seminar of playwrights is a rare occurrence, particularly when the participants are contemporary writers, old enough to have an oeuvre, and young enough to be active in their field. And what a bonus when they come from countries with little known theatres like Finland, Switzerland, Greece, Nepal, Pakistan and the Philippines! The International Playwrights Forum (January 6-8), at the National School of Drama, organised by the unobtrusive Marathi playwright Satish Alekar, Vice Chairman, NSD, offered them a platform for intimate dialogue.
Madeeha Gauhar, Pakistan
However, after the initial introduction to Indian theatre by playwright G.P. Deshpande and scholar Samik Bandyopadhyay, there was less debate and more theatre history about each speaker's nation. As other participants observed, such information could have been printed and distributed, leaving the members free to discuss craft and creativity.
Tripurari Sharma, India.
Recovering roots
Royston Abel
Yet, personal vision, struggle and commitment did slip into the historical reviews. Malou Jacob (Philippines) had every ear tuned when she began, "I am a playwright from one of the poorest countries in the world, its poverty is man made — by politicians, economists, and lately, the military." The ancient Babaylan healer's ritual theatre had kept the community's stories alive, before Christianity snuffed her out of existence. Heralded by gong and drum, she sang, chanted and danced into trances, driving illness and evil away. Filipino theatre turned its back to this past when it collaborated with the Spanish masters in the Moro-Moro, a spectacle of the Christians driving out the Moors, a theme bound to alienate the local Muslim population. The church appropriated the theatre again in dramatising the life of Christ. "The woman in Baclaran church, walking on her knees towards the altar, is the image of utter subjugation."
Samik Bandyopadhyay.
In the last century Filipino theatre subverted the Spanish musical into a tool of protest, satirised the Americans, ran into censorship, a flurry of arrests, and Martial Law. With the Americanisation of the nation, the theatre became effete, totally entertainment oriented. It lost its powers of protest, healing and cultural rehabilitation. Jacob's efforts as also those of other doughty, like-minded artistes, aim to recover the pre-colonial roots of traditional Babaylan performance. A hard task. But not impossible.
The State and theatre
Lia Karavia, Greece
Finland made a sunny contrast. "With a population of five million, Finland sells 2.5 million tickets annually for professional theatre productions. We go more to the theatre than to ice hockey or football!" said playwright Heikki Kujanpaa. Almost every town has its own State theatre and amateur companies. Art theatre flourishes in small halls, outside the big, state-propped academies.
Malou Jacob, Philippines.
Kujanpaa went on to explain that Finnish theatre had always been imbued with the social mission of educating the populace, but from the 1990s it witnessed a decrease of freedom along with the increase of subsidies. Political enlightenment yielded to artistic aims. Today "younger theatre workers believe that popular theatre is crap, and true performances are born in small groups with a lot of noise and not much money." Though translations of European plays are mounted across Finland, Finnish playwrights who succeed on home ground are unable to enter the international market. In the meanwhile, plays at home are getting to be more teamwork, less an individual's vision.
Switzerland has had a short history (500 years) but with multilingual theatres in German, Swiss, French, Italian and a near extinct Romance, it had to be diverse. Poet-playwright Tobias Biancone started with Christianity bringing in passion plays at Easter tide, and the first political play in German, born when the Swiss Confederation fought Germany. Folk theatre, especially in carnivals, was too rollicking for State and church. Censorship and prohibitions were imposed, companies had to take special permission for staging their works. In time, political plays became an expression of national confidence. However, "It is safer to mount dead writers like Goethe and Schiller than some modern, living playwright," conluded Biancone, adding wistfully, "Switzerland needs new enthusiasm among theatre workers to feel more, to grapple with the tensions of life."
Rajindernath, India
Listening to Lia Karavia, President of the International Playwrights' Forum (UNESCO), was to ride through the heaving tides of her own times in Greece. Despite dictatorships alternating with democracies, Greek theatre continues to critique and entertain, much as it did with Sophocles and Aristophanes long ago. (The latter we learn is a favourite with kids through comics!) "There is theatre everywhere, classical, folk and avante garde. On the Ionian Islands I saw the kind of street theatre that remains unique to it." The post-democracy milieu snuffed out some kinds of protest, and playwrights were no longer judged by ideology, but by their art. Some peddle violence and sex, others go in for symbolism and metaphor. The classics were always popular, sometimes in original guises. She herself recalls the shock of watching Medea murdering her children, shown by nothing more than a sudden splash of blood. Asked if the Greek playwrights went back to their roots, Karavia, herself the author of over 30 plays and 300 poems, smiled and said, "Ancient Greek drama survives because it probes elemental issues — lust turning to hatred, putting duty above love, desire for the mother, fear of death. We don't go back to the classics, we go on with them."
Professor Abhi Subedi focused on the startling texture of Nepalese theatre in the last two years. The trend was to dramatise brutal, real life events. Traditional theatre of myths went on as usual, and the annual ritual theatre valorised man against God, as Indra, King of Heaven, was paraded on the streets when caught in the act of theft. The more modern theatre revelled in violence, in sharing traumatic indignities and violations, rivalling the slaughter on the streets, spilling blood and gore on the stage. "It terrifies me," Subedi confessed. Conversely, street theatre was attempting a more artistic form. Neo-realist experiments jostled NGO promoted sloganeering, and collaborative labours with grants from the West. Little State subsidy, and less support from the government, but 17 groups managed to survive and put up shows big and small.
Heikki Kujanpaa, Finland
How is any theatre to be maintained in a nation hostile to the arts? How does one flag women's issues in a State which decrees that women are inferior to men? Said Madeeha Gauhar, Ajoka theatre, Pakistan, "The Partition left us rootless. Suddenly, we had to shed the tradition and heritage of the subcontinent, and adopt the fundamentalist Islam of Arabia to which we had no connections at all." Falsifications of history followed. Madeeha began her career in television and switched to the theatre despite the suppression and censorship it faced. Her encounters with Indian theatre fuelled the fire. Secret performances during stricter regimes have now come into the open under the more relaxed political climate. Last year Ajoka conducted the first Indo-Pak theatre festival in Lahore on women's issues.
Mahesh Elkunchwar
Hindi playwright Tripurari Sharma undertook a soul search. What does it mean to be a playwright when one is in the theatre not to make money, but to say something felt strongly, even when there are few in the hall to see and listen? "It makes us incomplete, a group of self conscious people, creating for each other." Constant self-questionings and the urge to be new, different, generate stress. Drawing from the folk arts is a discomfort area; such motifs cannot be prised out of their inherent philosophy of life. The dearth of plays however, leads to adapting from fiction, and to collaborative work — exciting but tricky. "In Delhi we are in a lab situation with the luxury to innovate," she says wryly. Fragmentation sparks creativity. Splitting becomes wholesome. Not always. Redefining can be dangerous.
Satish Alekar.
Universal brotherhood is a phrase bound to come up in any international meet. But "I can only be local, my target audience is in Maharashtra, not even in Delhi," said Marathi playwright Mahesh Elkunchwar, when he summed up the seminar proceedings. However, "Who more local than Chekhov?" he continued. "I don't want to walk into the trap of modernity and not understand my own heritage of tradition, history, culture, philosophy." Modernity is short-lived, trends burn themselves out. Bypassing life in navigating towards ideologies is another pitfall. Ideologies can change, reducing to irrelevance any work driven by topicality. "I am doomed if I don't understand my small world." The participants agreed that only the authentic local can expand into the universal. When that happens, a Nepalese play strikes an immediate chord in Helsinki or Manila.
Abhi Subedi, Nepal
The dissimilarities in the experiences encountered by the speakers from different hemispheres were obvious. More riveting were the common threads. Theatre practitioners from every nation were equally uncertain about just what theatre means in our times, in structure, texture, content, stylistics, and that risky thing called, for want of a better word, "purpose". They found their answers in spurts of creativity, rarely by design. Around the world the playwright is in search of his audience. And only those who came into the world of theatre because they simply could not keep away, survived in the medium. Tobias Biancone's poem "Movement" images the moment of expanding consciousness:
G.P. Deshpande.
Alone
like a wave
propelling oneself
above the trifles of life.
Together
like a flock of birds,
rising above
all limitations.
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