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Varied selection: (Clockwise from top) Ratan Thiyam’s “Prologue”, Arash Absalan’s Afghan play “The Caucasian Chalk Circle”, Pina Bausch’s “Bamboo Blues” and Amitesh Grover’s “Electronic City”.

Of the 26 plays that were staged over 12 days, 15 were the work of NSD alumni. The remaining 11 came from Switzerland, Poland, Germany, Norway, France, England, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran.

Expectedly, the Indian section was of uneven standard. Not all NSD alumni turn out good work all of the time. It was difficult to imagine for example that Mohan Maharishi, whose “Diwar Mein Ek Khidki Rehti Thi” had been so nimbly paced, could have directed the tedious “Dear Bapu”. It gave us useful information about the conflicting viewpoints of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru over important issues that affected India’s future; but to have two actors standing at lecterns reading the two men’s letters was a device that has had its day. Though Bhaskar Ghosh gave a nuanced reading of Gandhiji’s letters, Sunil Tandon reading Nehru’s, was unable to do much except declaim.

The other disappointment was Ratan Thiyam’s “Prologue”, the inaugural play. For some time now, Thiyam’s productions have teetered on the brink of decorativeness. The problem with “Prologue” was the sweep of time that Thiyam chose to address. To collapse the entire history of mankind into a 70-minute play was to risk simplification of an extreme kind.

The play took us through evolution, the birth of man, greed, war, destruction and so on to a hope for the future which lay in appreciating Nature’s bounties. The last speech was made by an actor in English with disastrous results. Gone were the lilting cadences of his own tongue. And gone too was what we assume to be the lyricism of the Manipuri text.

Except for this platitudinous speech, “Prologue” was a pleasure to listen to. The sound design comprised instruments of varied tones and timbres, songs sung in voices that seemed to recall all the pain of life, speeches like chants and the rhythmic hitting of palms against the floor. Reversible cloths became shawls, burdens to haul, floor coverings and screens. All the pleasures were for the eyes and the ears. The mind was forced to rest.

Our spirits lifted with Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry’s “The Suit”. Body, mind and heart were fully engaged here, and questions remained to tease you all the way home. “The Suit” is a departure from Chowdhry’s earlier work, based largely on myth and legend. “The Suit”, based on a story by South African journalist-writer Can Themba, is a stark urban play. A woman is caught with her lover. The husband punishes her by pretending that the suit left behind by the lover is an honoured visitor. She must look after him, feed him, take him for walks and introduce him to dinner guests. The wife can neither confess her guilt and be damned or forgiven; nor can she continue as if nothing had happened. As a final assault on her dignity, the husband asks her to make love to the suit. This is the turning point in their power equation. She turns the punishment into a provocatively sensuous performance which she will not stop at her husband’s orders. He breaks down and collapses. It is significant that the original story, heavy with political purpose, ends with the wife dying of humiliation.

Some of Chowdhry’s signature elements — a basin of water, food, cooking on stage — are here. But no lavish props and costumes. There is a very clever all-purpose structure to one side — a wash-place at floor level, kitchen on the middle level and terrace on top, that for one scene becomes a ping-pong table.

All the NSD alumni plays told more or less conventional stories. Amitesh Grover’s “Electronic City”, translated into English from Falk Richter’s German play was the only one that came from a world driven by technology. In this contemporary love story, the man never knows from one moment to the next where in the world he is while the woman goes into a panic when technology fails her in her airport job. What sets Grover apart from the others in the work he chooses to do is the masters he did after passing out from the NSD in live and recorded media from the London College of Art.

From the European segment of the festival, two were dance theatre performances — Pina Bausch’s “Bamboo Blues” and Monica Emilie Herstad’s unwieldily titled “Past is Simulation: The Ladies of the Sea vs Nora and Other Stories”.

Dance theatre works around themes rather than stories. The immediate impact is sensory. One movement follows another working to an unwritten script that the audience must grasp as best they can. The Norwegian performance piece was dense with references which became significant only if, besides Ibsen, you also knew the work of the director Elfriede Jelinek and the late Susan Sontag’s reading of “Lady of the Sea”. Otherwise what you saw were incredibly flexible female bodies that posed, contorted, writhed and grew slack to express a whole spectrum of emotions, dark to bright, between male-constructed women and women as they are and want to be.

Pina Bausch’s “Bamboo Blues” was more accessible than Herstad’s piece. Structured as usual in contrasting movements, group work followed by solo dance, quietness followed by frenzy, dappled darkness followed by radiance, it had emotion, humour, irony and wit. The piece was built bit by bit from impressions that she and her dancers had gathered when they travelled through the streets of Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata. The sequence in which women and men do a ramp walk treating the mundu as a fashion garment was hilarious.

The Polish play “Nijinsky, the God” directed by Piotr Tomaszuk, was moving even for those who had no clue to the turbulent relationship between the Polish dancer Vaclav Nijinsky and Diaghilev, his promoter and lover. Here was a man who had danced like a god. What we saw as dance was the outward expression of a mind that was slowly going to pieces. Diaghilev was dead and Nijnsky, committed to a lunatic asylum, was fulfilling his vow to dance on his grave.

Rafa Grasowsky’s loose-limbed, lanky frame, the red gash of his mouth, his contorted body language, the sound design comprising the delicate tinkle of bells, hymns sung in four voices, richly sonorous ballet music, the susurration of padded feet shuffling on the floor and the distorted howls coming from the dancer’s disintegrating brain made for a powerful and deeply disturbing theatrical experience. The question who was the source of dance — God or Satan — hung in the air, till it was poignantly resolved in the last scene, where Nijinsky crucifies and so redeems himself.

Nearer home, there was “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” from Afghanistan, directed by Arash Absalan. An energetic production, faithful to the original text all the way, it made a significant departure just before the end. In the tussle for possession of a child between Natella, the biological mother who had abandoned him during a coup and Grusha the kitchen maid who picked him up and looked after him, the judge rules in favour of the maid. But Absalan gave this end a painful twist by first handing the child over to Natella. Was he referring to Iran, his own country, and Afghanistan, his adopted country, by implying that justice often favoured those who cared least for the welfare of what they claimed as theirs?

Perhaps. But one question remained unanswered. Why was the Chinese translation of the old, misty-eyed American play “Butterflies are Free” invited to the festival? It was touchingly sincere and seriously amateurish.

Ironically, the NSD was set up to do precisely that. This transpired in the course of a discussion about NSD’s achievements. Prof. Kirti Jain, making an opening statement, anticipated almost everything regarding NSD’s purpose, activities and functioning that the theatre community was likely to have problems with.

Among other things, she admitted that the school was originally envisaged as a place where theatre people from around the country could come to hone their skills, think, read, watch, debate and, most importantly, ask themselves what they were doing and why.

The discussion was too short to go into reasons why this had not happened and why some of the other problems Prof Jain mentioned had not been resolved. What had been done, however, was reach out to the rest of the country with workshops and most recently with the opening of its branch in Bangalore with other branches scheduled to follow. There is also an embryonic plan for collaboration between NSD and the NCERT to train teachers to teach theatre in schools. If the plan took shape, it would create a more informed audience for the future.

One question that bothered many people was the lack of opportunities for non-Hindi speaking alumni to find challenging theatre work in their home States. State repertories would have been the answer.

But could we expect the NSD or the State governments to set them up? Equally, could it be held responsible for what its alumni did after they left? Some moral outrage was expressed by several members of the audience about NSD alumni doing television and film, but not theatre.

The only answer to that was ground reality. Theatre does not help actors pay their bills. Television does that and more. In Mumbai television actors move quickly out of dingy rooms into decent accommodation; and, if they are prepared to work 16 hours a day, they buy cars as well.

In the last analysis it would be difficult not to concede that the NSD has produced exceptionally skilled theatre actors and directors, though they come with a stamp that you can recognise a mile off.

But that does not stop one from regretting the fact that it was not able to realise its original purpose, which would have served the theatres of India better.

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