It was a Russian who directed the first regional language play in a regular proscenium theatre in India. Amazing but true! Imagine yourself in a tiny little theatre in Calcutta over two centuries ago. There are boxes all around you for seating, full of excited Bengali gentry, while backstage a young man of Slav descent, Lebedev, paces up and down waiting for the curtain to go up. Lebedev has managed the near impossible, a cast of men and women acting together, and throwing open the auditorium to an Indian audience. The year is 1795, the date is the 25th of November, the play Love is the Best Doctor. And when the curtain rose on this performance, modern theatre in India began. Two hundred and twenty years after Lebedev, his legacy is in worthy hands.
In 1813, the prestigious Chowringhee Theatre of Calcutta that had been until then only reserved for the Britishers, bowed to public pressure and opened its door to Indians for the first time. The result—about 1,000 people were turned away and we had our first recorded ‘box office hit’. By 1835, scenes from Julius Caesar and the Merchant of Venice were regularly preformed in Bengali, but it was not till Michael Madhusudan Dutt had written Sharmista that original Indian plays were performed. Going beyond Bengali, and Calcutta, he nurtured the theatre movement in both Hindi and English. The main group till the 1980s was Anamika Kala Sangam in Hindi. It is Padatik today. Padatik’s small studio performance space can accomodate around 50 people. Dario Fo’s formidable monologue for a sole actress, A Woman Alone, was the night’s performance and the audience, all mainly 50-plus wait patiently in a queue to be let in. The following day, I got a chance to see the beginnings of a series of improvisational rehearsals of one of their future productions, directed by Vinay Sharma. In keeping with Padatik’s policy of trying to do things with impunity and not remaining run of the mill, Vinay works with two actors. Anubha Fatehpuria and Pradip Mitra sat on adjoining chairs, their reverie broken as Vinay catapults objects he finds in the room at them: empty Bisleri bottles, a pair of high heeled ladies shoes, a stick, encouraging them to use the objects to ‘dialogue’ with one another, without words. There is a lot of give and take as they ‘assemble’ a third character from the objects. Vinay’s own pluralistic vision of the theatre comes from his training under his mentor Shyamanand Jalan who formed Padatik with Chetna in 1974. Shyamanand, who died in 2010, was known in theatre for always remaining true to the playwright’s vision, which meant that he did not alter a word of what was written, and often invited playwrights to come and be part of the rehearsal process. For one of Rakesh’s plays, Lehron ke Raj Hans on the life of Nand, the Buddha’s brother, the playwrights spent three weeks in Kolkatta interacting with the cast, and finally rewrote the third act.
— feisal.alkazi@rediffmail.com
