Romance with Theatre

When will we have our own vibrant theatre culture sustaining our own version of Broadway, questions Pavan K Varma.

The Dubey sisters-Lillette and Lushin-were in London last week, and had engagements at the Nehru Centre. Lushin runs two theatre groups, Kidsworld and Theatreworld, and is an exceptionally talented director and actress. Her play Life of Gautam Buddha has successfully toured the world; she has also very ably adapted for the stage Pinki Virani's book Bitter Chocolate, which is based on the traumas of abused children. Lillette was the founder member of the Delhi based Theatre Action Group, and in 1991 formed Primetime Theatre Company to promote English language theatre from India. However she has won far greater fame through her forays into films. Most people remember her as the fraught mother of the bride, Pimmi Verma, in Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding, and for her role in films like Baghban and Kal Ho Na Ho.

I have known Lushin for some years, and Lillette too, although less well. The pretty Sindhi sisters are married to two brothers, Pradip and Ravi. Lushin, who is younger, is married to the older brother, Pradip, and Lillette to Ravi. Pradip teaches applied mathematics at Yale. Ravi was a high profile manager of the Taj group of hotels, and has now resigned to set up his own consultancy in Mumbai. Both brothers were with me at St Columbus school in New Delhi: Pradip was senior, and Ravi junior. A third brother, Rajiv, who is now Vice President of Mahindras, was in my class.

My view, which I shared with Lushin and Lillette, is that English theatre in India with very few exceptions is a bit of an embarrassment. For a long time the English educated elite in India used to perform plays written by English playwrights, from Shakespeare to Noel Coward. These were performed to small audiences of missy babas and babys and their brown saheb parents, and sounded so incongruous and implanted in an Indian setting, that only the dullest or completely brainwashed could have sat through without wondering what on earth was going on. I must clarify straightaway that this is not meant to be a critique of English playwrights. The best of them are masters of the genre, writing plays, which are in sync with their own milieu, their own concerns, and their own linguistic idioms. But to have Indians mouthing their lines in a theatre in Delhi or Lucknow appears a bit ludicrous.

The attempt to adapt English plays to an Indian setting is an improvement, but, to my mind, still very derivative. Are there no worthwhile playwrights in India? If so, why are they not used? And if not, why is a country with such a rich dramatic heritage from the days of Kalidasa, reduced to this degree of theatrical penury? Are English plays copied because those who produce plays don't know what is being written in the Indian languages? Are Vijay Tendulkar, Girish Karnad and Rakesh Mohan the only good playwrights we have?

If adaptations of English plays leave me cold, crossover plays are worse. Some time ago I saw Shakespeare's Twelfth Night being performed by Indian characters in Indian settings on a London stage. The whole performance was so synthetic and laboured and artificial, with a few Hindi words thrown in between chunks of badly pronounced lines from Shakespeare, that I wondered why there is no law to ban such things.

The other question, of course, is of finances. Producing plays costs money. Producers need funding, and as importantly, opportunities to recover their investment. For this they need sponsors and a committed audience. The absence in India of both prompts one to ask the question: Do Indians not like to pay money to see a good Indian play, or, even worse, are there no good Indian plays to attract viewers? I recall that in Moscow, in the early 1990s, when most people did not have money to eat well, there would still be mile long queues for a good play. I understand that something like this happens in Maharashtra, and perhaps in Bengal too. But what about the rest of India? When will we have our own nationwide vibrant theatre culture sustaining our own version of Broadway?

London is heaven, I know, for theatregoers. I have a gnawing regret that I am not seeing as many plays I should. Finding time is a problem, but whenever I can, I watch for a few minutes the next best thing to good theatre: Speakers Corner at Hyde Park.

(A Stephanian, Pavan Kumar Varma is a senior Indian diplomat and presently Minister of Culture and Director of the Nehru Centre in London. Author of several widely acclaimed books likeGhalib: the Man, the Times and the recently released Being Indian, he will be writing the column Hyde Park Corner, exclusively for HindustanTimes.com)