World Theatre Day 2019: Three Indian playwrights tell us about the scripts they never staged

World Theatre Day, observed on 27 March, was initiated in 1962. It’s meant to serve as a reminder of the importance of the art form of theatre, of its value as an instrument of social change, its power to serve as a wake-up call to governments, societies and authority figures, even individuals.

The theatre that doesn’t make it to the stage can sometimes be just as powerful as what does.

Through 2018, Firstpost ran a series of interviews with Indian playwrights, about the script/s they never managed to bring to stage (or did after a very long struggle). From veterans like Rahul DaCunha and Ramu Ramanathan to voices like Purva Naresh, we found out about plays that had long simmered in their creators’ minds (and on the page) but could not be mounted as productions for a variety of reasons.

All of these interviews were conducted by journalist Lakshmi Govindrajan Javeri for Firstpost.

On World Theatre Day 2019, here’s a look at some of them:

Rahul DaCunha on I Do and Page 3 — two unfinished scripts he hasn’t yet given up on

Back in 2003-04, Rahul started writing a play titled Page 3. He says, “Reeling from political ineptitude, Mumbai needed a CEO, who would not be aligned to any party, and who would be held accountable like any CEO in a company would. Stemming from this belief, I started writing a play about the marriage of two people inhabiting different worlds: a socialist and a socialite. A friend starts to disrupt the life of the socialist. It was a humour-laced social commentary on the convenience of friendships, relationships and politics.”

One year into writing Page 3, Rahul found himself at the beginning of his divorce proceedings. Where Page 3 came out of his frustrations of being a citizen in a corrupt city, Rahul found that writing about his emotional situation was cathartic. I Do stemmed from his personal anger at himself, at the system, at where his life was; the writing of which began while he was sitting in the divorce court.

Meant to be a one-and-a-half-hour play with no intervals, I Do was about two people sitting in divorce court along with their lawyers as they wait for the judge to arrive. The conversation between the two oscillates from making pointed observations about relationships to acerbic humour about the state of affairs.

While Page 3 took the backseat in the process of Rahul’s divorce, I Do too reached a stage where the playwright couldn’t go further. In drama school, playwrights are often asked what their anger is. The anger, in this case, is the rage or the passion that drives a writer to wake up and write about the issues that matter to him. While Rahul was writing I Do, he got divorced, became friends again with his ex-wife and somehow the anger fizzled out. “When the anger fizzled out, so did the play. I realised at one point that the play needed another angle. At that stage in my life, I couldn’t find it.”

Read the full interview with Rahul DaCunha here.

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Purva Naresh on her unfinished Irom Sharmila play: We’ve already failed her; I can’t do it again

For five years, Purva had been gravitating towards writing about Manipuri civil rights and political activist Irom Sharmila. “I was so interested by her life and what she stood for. There was abundant information about her activities in the newspapers. I read up a lot beyond that, had even planned to go and meet her as part of my research. Yet I felt I couldn’t crack the idea of the play. If it’s based on someone, I don’t want it to sound like another adulatory work, or a biography. I wasn’t looking to document Irom Sharmila. I was looking to write about what makes her who she is…her Irom Sharmila-‘ness’,” Purva said.

Her perspective was well in place but Purva has been keen to not make the play about just Irom Sharmila’s struggles or make it a plot-oriented piece of work that strings together incident after incident that shaped the activist’s life. How to proceed with the idea of her is fundamental to the writing of the play. Setting the play in the context of contemporary India and giving it a global perspective, Purva is still looking to answer why she would write about Irom Sharmila today.

“One of the reasons I’m stuck with this script is because we as a people have already failed Irom Sharmila once. I can’t do that again. I need to have the script right.”

Read the full interview with Purva Naresh here.

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Ramu Ramanathan, raconteur extraordinaire, on the stories he’d love to bring to the stage

A story that Ramu Ramanathan wants to write finds its roots in the Mathura rape case of 1972. The story of the custodial rape of a young Adivasi girl by two policemen saw much public anguish. The High Court set aside a sessions court judgment that stated her being habituated to intercourse, therefore making her consent implicit. The High Court held that passively submitting out of fear cannot be construed as consent. While this judgment was historic, the Supreme Court of India’s ghastly reversal of the High Court judgment on grounds of no visible signs of struggle, saw the acquittal of the accused. This led to public outcry and gave birth to many women’s rights groups whose activists went on to become leading voices in matters of gender equality over the years.

“Every single time I sat down to write about this, something else was playing on outside that would make me stop. Whether it was the cases of the ’90s, the bar dancers in the subsequent decade, or even Nirbhaya, there was something even more horrific happening simultaneously. The idea to write this play was to contextualise the independent women’s autonomous movement. Over time the sexual violence of that play got diminished because of what’s been happening. One wouldn’t want to be seeing as tapping on the hysteria that surrounds such major movements,” he says.

Ramanathan has worked out all the characters and situations, with the tone of the play needing some more time and thought. Over three decades, Ramanathan has accumulated copious notes, while meeting extraordinary women who have participated in various movements that sought better rights and justice for women. “It is undoubtedly a play about what happened to Mathura and the aftermath, but it is the kind of atrocity and travesty of justice that has manifested again and again through various instances, each time questioning the middle-class morality of a woman’s identity. I’ve imagined this play to open with a rock song, because what better than rock to be a voice of protest!”

Read the complete interview with Ramu Ramanathan here.

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Read more theatre stories on Firstpost here  and here .