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Plumbing the silences
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CHATLINE It’s the interactions between characters that interest her, playwright Anupama Chandrasekhar tells GOWRI RAMNARAYAN
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Dreamless sleep is possible only after a physically and mentally taxing day of playwriting
PHOTO: SHAJU JOHN
ROOTED IN THE FAMILIAR Anupama Chandrasekhar
I don’t know whether the Royal Court Theatre will produce my new play. But I’ll get paid nonetheless as they’ve commissioned me to write it,” she says with a naughty gleam in her eye. To Anupama Chandrasekhar, 34, this means a whole year of freedom from financial concerns to concentrate on writing. A luxury in India where writing plays remains a part time activity. “And I’m going to write three plays, not one,” she exults. “I’ve got to finish them before I get more ideas!”
Anupama’s association with RCT, London, began when she participated in a residency programme there as a Charles Wallace Fellow. Her “Free Outgoing” at RCT got sold out by the second week. The play is set to shift to RCT’s main stage in London, and for a month’s run at Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Fringe, 2008. Moreover, hadn’t RCT produced two of her short plays?
It was at a workshop organized by the Madras Players and the British Council, masterminded by Mahesh Dattani, that Anupama discovered play writing. Before that, as a literature student, she had been absorbed in poetry.
Nor had she watched many plays, recalling only Sujata’s “Jannal” and Manohar’s “Lankeswaran” by name. Her job in Businessline taught her precision, but, she says, “I had too much empathy to be a good journalist. I was always putting myself in others’ shoes, and looking for subtexts!”
A sense of guilt at not using all her potential (“Though I didn’t know what it was!”) made Anupama quit work for post-graduate studies in Stella Maris. “This guilt has diminished since I learnt who I am: a playwright. Dreamless sleep is possible only after a physically and mentally taxing day of playwriting.”
An anonymous donation enabled Theatre Nisha to stage her first play “Closer Apart” in Chennai. But it was only after the Prithvi premiere of “Acid” in the Writers’ Bloc Festival that Anupama began to call herself a playwright. “I learnt a lot, mainly the art of rewriting. I had to rework the second half of the play by trial and error, even while it was being rehearsed.” The play was a runner up for the Jane Chambers’ Prize for women playwrights.
Having read rather than watched plays she knew that she had to invest all her time and energy to acquire the craft tools essential for good playwriting. She was happy to make that fulltime commitment because she was excited by dialogue. Interactions between characters offered scope for silences. “I’m a sub-texual writer,” she says.
Anupama directed her “Acid” for the Madras Players last year but admits that she has no natural flair for direction. “Only 5 per cent of a director’s work is creative. The rest is about getting all your actors together in one space to start working. Exhausting! Will the actors work better if you pay them?”
Luckily she likes teaming with “another brain”, mentioning director Indu Rubasingam’s sensitivity in the RCT production of “Free Outgoing.” She is grateful for RCT’s liberating focus on the playwright’s rather than the director’s vision.
Chennai lacks spaces like Ranga Shankara and Prithvi for year round theatre activity, essential to develop a theatre going habit, and stimulate debate in the theatre community. Sadly, unlike London or Mumbai, the city lacks a large pool of actors. “We must have more workshops. How do we reach out? How do we enthuse youngsters to see, write, act in plays?”
No, it is not easy to be a playwright in theatre-arid Chennai. But Anupama is convinced that she can make a living out of her passion. She is now exploring other genres, particularly screenwriting, with its endless scope for visuals, so different from the oral, auditory experience in plays. But she knows that this freedom can be a constraint in itself!” One of her short stories won the regional prize in the CBA Commonwealth competition.
Anupama sees herself as primarily a reader rooted in the familiar, who loves to get into other worlds. Fantasy (Dark Materials Trilogy, Mists of Avalon) fascinates her, though her own work is naturalistic. Her “personal stories in social contexts” emerge from ideas triggered by learning about happenings around the world from newspapers.
Marriage plans? “Where are the guys? All abroad,” Anupama laughs. “Chennai is my world. For now, anyway.”
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Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Madurai
Mangalore
Puducherry
Tiruchirapalli
Thiruvananthapuram
Vijayawada
Visakhapatnam
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