The Sense of an Ending

My Mirror column:

Regal, one of Delhi’s iconic single-screen theatres, closed down this week. But what exactly is ending with its closure?

Regal Theatre downed its shutters on Thursday. Born in 1932, as the New Delhi Premier Theatre, the hall was the first to come up outside of Shahjahanbad, giving New Delhi a sahabi theatre to match its status as the newly-created capital of British India. Regal came up on property belonging to Sir Sobha Singh, the civil contractor and builder hired to construct much of the new city. Sobha Singh was commercially perspicacious enough to buy up large tracts of land within the emerging capital city, becoming known as “Addha Dilli da maalik”. He was clearly also a man of vision.

Among a host of other buildings, Sir Sobha gave bungalow-lined New Delhi its first apartment complex, naming it Sujan Singh Park after his civil contractor father (and his son, the writer and journalist, Khushwant Singh lived in one of the apartments there until his death in March 2014). The Regal building, with its arched porch, vaulted half-domes and pietra dura mosaic work, was designed by the British architect Walter Sykes George, who also designed Sujan Singh Park and St Stephen's College, among other iconic Delhi buildings.

George and Singh conceptualised the Regal complex as a sort of protomall, containing not just the theatre, but also a panoply of restaurants and shops. It is not a coincidence that the memories of watching films at Regal – of which there has been a veritable flood in the media and on social media – are almost as much about the eating and drinking that accompanied it. People in their fifties, sixties and seventies remember their Regal outings alongside the chhole-bhature at Kwality (the also-iconic restaurant in the same corner block of Connaught Place), or continental fare at Davico's on the top floor of the building. (Davico's was later replaced by Standard Restaurant, where even I have eaten my share of perfect mutton cutlets, up until the late 1990s.) In more recent years, there was the Softy stall, tucked into a sort of alcove next to the cinema.

The multiplex era began in Delhi in 1997, when Anupam Cinema in Saket was bought by Ajay Bijli's PVR group and a new four-screen building built in its stead, creating what we now know as PVR Anupam. Over the last two decades, several of Delhi's best-loved single-screen cinemas – Alankar in Lajpat Nagar, Eros in Jangpura Extension, Savitri in Greater Kailash II, not to mention Odeon, Rivoli and Plaza in Connaught Place – have been converted into multiplexes. Others, like Chanakya or Paras or Kamal, have not survived at all.

Regal was one of the last single-screen theatres that continued to function. This grand old edifice, which started out showing Prithviraj Kapoor plays and Russian ballet to British officers and diplomats, and to which the posher Indian families and postcolonial grandees like Nehru and Radhakrishnan came as a matter of course, seemed like a connection to a more genteel world. So the last day, last show at Regal – like the closure of Chanakya in 2007 – feels like the end of a civilised age. And if you go by everything I've just told you, it certainly is.

But what did Regal signify in the last two or three decades? And to whom? Even as its Connaught Place cohort of halls reinvented themselves as multiplexes and wooed a post-liberalisation elite, Regal started to play desperately lowbrow fare, like Chhupa Rustam in 2001 and Raam Gopal Verma Ki Aag in 2007. My own last memory of Regal is a near-traumatic one from 2003: I cannot quite remember why, but I subjected myself to Guddu Dhanoa's sex-horror film called Hawa, in which Tabu is raped more than once by “the wind” — which has, of course, taken on the ghostly shape of a man.

A cinema is, after all, a business — and films like Hawa were clearly Regal's frank attempt to put bums on seats. The management was quite cognizant that the theatre's technical quality and comfort levels were no longer good enough to attract the class of people who used to come to it until the 1970s, making successes of such films as Shyam Benegal's Nishant and Ankur, Basu Chatterjee's Rajnigandha, or melancholy Amitabh-Jaya romances like Abhimaan or Mili. Those people had better alternatives. The people who came to Regal were those who couldn't afford the 200 and 300 and 400 rupee tickets that multiplexes charge – and that Regal will no doubt charge in its new avatar.

But those who filled up Regal's seats in recent years, keeping it afloat for two or more decades, are not the ones being spoken to. The Delhi Times is filled with upper middle class people who have returned to be present at Regal's grand farewell party, and are happy to pay Rs. 300 in black to let their mothers watch Raj Kapoor's Sangam and reminisce about their youth. There is no mention of the hundreds, perhaps thousands of viewers who could, until yesterday, afford to watch a film in a Connaught Place theatre, and who have been quietly been added to the vast masses that will now no longer be able to go to the cinema.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 April 2017.

Theatre: The Winter's Tale

Two theatre directors add a bit of sparkle (and some masala) to a Shakespearean gem.



When Anirudh Nair first approached Neel Chaudhuri two years ago with the idea that they direct a play together, they didn’t know the collaboration was going to lead them to The Winter’s Tale. Or even Shakespeare. Having cut his teeth on ShakeSoc (as the St. Stephen’s College theatre society refers to itself), Chaudhuri admits, may have dulled his enthusiasm for Shakespeare -- or at least “the myopic reverence that seems to colour everyone's attitudes towards studying and performing Shakespeare”. In any case, says Chaudhuri, he was “dying to work on a Chekhov text”.

The desire to work with a straight-up classic was something new for Chaudhuri. As he put it himself, his trajectory as a playwright and director until now “seems to have studiously avoided any affinity for classical modes of drama and performance”. From the improvised vignettes of Positions (2006) to the rather adventurous Mouse (2008), an unsettling interaction between an ‘actor’ and a ‘director’ which unfolded at least partially in the dark, via the thoroughly remarkable A Brief History of the Pantomimes (2008), right down to the superbly realized Taramandal (2010) (which won the Hindu Metroplus award for playwriting), Neel Chaudhuri’s plays have been about storytelling with a certain economy. Even when the dialogue is absolutely crucial, the dominant sensation you take away from his productions is one of quiet. And even when his starting point has been a well-known text – in Ich bin Fassbinder (2011) it was Fassbinder’s epochal film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, in Taramandal it was Satyajit Ray’s short story about thwarted ambition, ‘Patol Babu, Film Star’ – Chaudhuri’s way has been to push at its edges, or to create narrative echoes for it, never simply to take the text as is.

Nair, on the other hand, has been working a lot with Shakespeare over the past four or five years – on using physical theatre in Shakespeare and also studying original practice (working with the specificities of Shakespearean rhythms, pentameter, how to use the punctuation, and so on). Nair’s Wide Aisle Productions has also been working on a project that takes Shakespeare to schools, and many of the actors who’re part of that project are also part of the Tadpole Repertory. Tadpole, founded in 2009, is a loose confederation of talented actors in concert with whom Chaudhuri has produced pretty much all his plays.

Chaudhuri was excited about what he and the Tadpole actors could learn from incorporating Nair’s physical training and gesture work. So Shakespeare it was. The group decided they wanted a play that had possibilities as an ensemble piece, not centred heavily around one or two characters – this eliminated, for instance, Hamlet and Othello – and something that Indian theatre-goers weren’t likely to be familiar with – this meant Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, King Lear and The Merchant of Venice were all out. From a shortlist that included The Taming of the Shrew and Pericles, the final choice was The Winter’s Tale.

One of Shakespeare’s later works, the play is split into two: the first half is a tragic tale of jealousy that unfolds in the court of King Leontes of Sicilia, while the second, which opens 16 years later in the kingdom of Bohemia, is exuberant in both its comedy and its romance. “The duality was both beguiling and bewildering,” says Chaudhuri. “It struck us as quite unique – court and country, tragedy and comedy, death and restoration, tyranny and abandonment. After a point it seemed really clear to us that it was a play ripe for all our ambitions.” The production that unfolded amid the astonishingly apt lily ponds and landscaped grassy mounds of Zorba the Buddha in Delhi this March certainly realized those ambitions. The cast moved with marvelous felicity -- from one part of the open-air venue to another, between the play’s inherent binaries, and most admirably, from a never-stiff Shakespearian English to a glorious, mobile Hindustani.

The confidence of that linguistic decision lies at the root of what is most striking about the play. It plays off the duality that already exists, and creates new ones. Tanzil Ahmad’s superb translation is finely attuned to changes of register in the original, recreating both high and low – and within the low, shifting between “the playfully exaggerated, the bawdy and the mundane”. So the trickster Autolycus’s aside to the audience, “If the springe hold, the cock’s mine!” becomes “Idhar phanda laga, udhar murga phansa!!”; the Clown’s exclamation, “I’ the name of me—” becomes “Arre teri!”. There is even room for the occasional Hinglish moment, without it turning into a fetish or a quirk. And whether they are speaking in English or Hindustani, the actors successfully inhabit the dialogue, bringing to their speech the individual accents and styles that come naturally to them.

Despite what anyone might tell you, Shakespearean language takes a while to get used to. And yet when your ear accepts it, it can be more poetic and brilliant than anything you imagined. Nair and Chaudhuri’s production provides the wonderful sense of being at home, both in the language of Shakespeare and in a language a lot of us know but no longer really speak. This is a production that is both absolutely universal and yet utterly located in the here and now of 2013 India. There is something remarkable going on here. As Leontes says at the end of the play, “If this be magic, let it be an art/ Lawful as eating.”

Published in the April-May issue of Le City Deluxe, an international luxury lifestyle magazine that has recently launched in India (and was kind enough to want to publish a theatre-related piece).

WHY INDIAN THEATRE NEEDS META

A still from Akvarious Productions' The Interview

It’s garnered immense goodwill over the years among the theatre fraternity. But what has the Mahindra Theatre Festival actually achieved? TRISHA GUPTA finds out

AMONG THE PLAYS showcased at the sixth Mahindra Theatre Festival, just held in Delhi, was a production in English called Dancing on Glass. Written and directed by Ram Ganesh Kamatham, Dancing... is a scathing take on the IT world in Bengaluru. It also contains what the festival website describes as “some explicit language”. A few months ago, Kamatham’s play caught the eye of The Guardian’s theatre blog. Having excitedly described its expletive-laden dialogue as “drawing gasps” from Delhi’s Habitat Centre audience, the blog went on to heap praises on Kamatham for placing a “darker and angrier vision of India on stage” than is done “in the West and by its own film industry”.

Much might be said for the play’s brutal energy and unabashed language. But The Guardian blogger hangs his appreciation on the idea that in “a cultural climate dominated by escapist Bollywood narratives [and] song-and-dance routine[s]... realism can be every bit as shocking as the swearing.” The lazy, catch-all Bollywood bashing apart, this is precisely the sort of polemical argument that often gets made about theatre in India — sometimes, sadly, by theatrewalas themselves. But it is a tiresome and inaccurate stance, one that only does disservice to the thing it wants to promote — because while realist, outspoken, angry, unmusical plays are part of the contemporary Indian theatre scene, there are as many that are fantastical or myth-inspired, tender, thoughtful or riotously musical. The brilliance of Indian theatre — if such a thing can be assumed — lies in its capaciousness.

It is this capacious spirit that the Mahindra Theatre Festival, instituted in 2006 in conjunction with the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards (META), seeks to embody. Plays staged have ranged from marvellous amalgams of literature, dance and music like Sangit Giribala (2008), Chetan Datar’s Marathi production based on Tagore’s short story Manabhanjan, to the affecting mime play Mirel Masingkha from Manipur, which won awards for Best Original Script and Best Sound Design in 2010. Plays that apply can be non-verbal and can include physical theatre, puppetry, multimedia and dance. Sanjoy Roy of Teamwork Films, whose team has been organising META since its inception, remembers an entry from Odisha last year that was taken from village to village by bicycle. While it didn’t make the final shortlist, the instance reveals an organisational vision inclusive and egalitarian enough to pit a practically unknown production from Kerala against a Girish Karnad play. After the inaugural year, when competing plays were first divided into “established” and “emerging” theatre, META has also done away with the seniority-based hierarchy that leads to competitions being limited to playwrights or directors under a certain age — like Mumbai’s Thespo. “The sifting process tries to showcase the best theatre and largely it succeeds,” says Mahesh Elkunchwar, Marathi playwright and META jury member for 2011.

META’s “sifting process” is also unusual. Unlike most theatre festivals, including the National School of Drama’s (NSD) Bharat Rang Mahotsav in Delhi, the Prithvi Festival in Mumbai, or the Ranga Shankara Festival in Bengaluru, it is not based on invitations. “We started in 2006 by asking our selectors to send their recommendations, but since then, it’s been a democratic process, where any group can apply,” says Roy. Ten productions are shortlisted from hundreds of DVD recordings by a committee of theatre experts to perform at the festival in Delhi, where they are viewed by the public and by a special jury. Plays compete for honours in 13 categories, from Stage Design to Best Ensemble.

OF COURSE, not having a ‘quota system’ that ensures equitable regional representation means that states and cities with a thriving theatre scene send in more entries and are likely to get more plays in. Over the past six years, Kerala, Assam and Manipur have all been regularly represented, as have Meghalaya, Delhi, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. The most consistently successful state, though, is Maharashtra, with plays from Mumbai and Pune often dominating the festival. The 2011 selection was particularly skewed, with five productions from Mumbai and two from Pune. “With seven plays from Maharashtra, people were joking the festival this year should be held in Mumbai,” laughs Mumbai-based director Akarsh Khurana, whose dark satire The Interview is one of the seven. “But really, Mumbai audiences have had a chance to see them, so it’s great that it’s in Delhi.”

Maharashtra’s dominance at the META awards is perhaps not surprising. Apart from having successful commercial theatre in Marathi and Gujarati (and in Hindi and English, if in lesser numbers), Maharashtra regularly holds districtand state-level theatre competitions with state-sponsored awards. Though some other state governments like West Bengal and Manipur do give away theatre awards, as do corporations and smaller bodies devoted to the arts in some states, recognition and financial support for theatre in India is less than negligible. “Normally theatrepeople live in penury,” says Elkunchwar matterof- factly. In the contemporary Indian scenario, where non-commercial theatre survives largely as a labour of love, the power of the financial reward cannot be underestimated. Though the sums are by no means large if you place them in the context of the contemporary cost of living in urban India — Best Production gets Rs. 1 lakh, Best Original Playwright, Rs. 75,000, and the 11 other awards Rs. 35,000 each — the money is a bounty for most Indian practitioners. “META is the only thing that has given the experimental theatrewala some money,” says a grateful Manav Kaul, whose remarkable plays have won awards almost every year.

FOR LESSER-KNOWN groups, it is the prestige of competing at the national level that makes META a lifealtering experience. The excitement of performing to a full house at Delhi’s Kamani or Shri Ram Center auditorium is palpable, especially in those who do not work in urban metropolitan contexts — even if, like Bidyawati Phukan, director of last year’s award-winning Guti Phulor Gamosa, their performances regularly gather crowds of thousands. Phukan, whose group UTSA lives and works out of Namaithang, a village near Assam’s border with Arunachal, remembers the META experience warmly. “It was wonderful to meet other groups, and people like Boman Irani and MS Sathyu. And the awards inspired our group to work harder.” For Dr Yumnam Sadananda Singh of Manipur’s Kanglei Mime Theatre Company, META brought rare exposure. “We were invited to the NSD festival in January. It was packed. Many couldn’t get tickets. Now we are doing shows in Kolkata and Kerala.”

In great measure, the immense tide of goodwill generated by META and the Mahindra festival over the past six years is an index of how starved theatre, like the arts in India in general, is for both funding and recognition. “Any form of support for theatre can only be lauded,” says Neelam Mansingh Chowdhury, who runs the critically-acclaimed Chandigarh- based theatre group The Company and is a META jury member for 2011. Theatrepeople seem almost resigned to the fact that there is little space for critical (or any) coverage of theatre in a media culture so dominated by popular cinema. “There seems even less coverage than 10 years ago,” muses Mansingh. “But the play in the context of the festival gets covered at least.” “Theatre may or may not draw large audiences, may not have any visible returns in terms of a spotlight on the sponsors,” concurs Anuradha Kapur, director of NSD and co-jury member. But while most theatrepeople are deeply grateful for the existence of a META, it is far from filling the enormous and urgent need that exists. “There is absolutely no reason to be apologetic in demanding State support,” says Kapur. “The world’s best, most cutting-edge theatre, German or British, subsists on State funding.” Sanjoy Roy points out that the arts in India function despite — not because of — government policies. “It is not handing out money for charity, but an investment in the wealth of the nation, in creativity. And creative arts like theatre also provide a platform for the discontented voice: we see it in plays from the Northeast every year.” Clearly there is a great deal more that needs to be done, and no shortage of ideas about directions from which change can come. And almost every theatreperson you ask has tens of them — taking theatre festivals to smaller towns, instituting permanent repertory companies that might afford a viable livelihood to theatre practitioners, building affordable theatres in every Indian city. What makes META special is that it has had the gumption to go beyond the small-scale ambitions with which theatre in this country is taught to be content. Perhaps what is needed is to think even bigger. Arundhati Nag, 2011 jury member and founder of Bengaluru’s remarkable theatre hub, Ranga Shankara, is not being facetious when she says corporates have a duty to patronise theatre: “Earlier, you had kings, now you have corporations. Why should there be an IPL only in cricket? Why not in theatre?”

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 8, Issue 11, Dated 19 Mar 2011

The sounds of a vanishing world - Theatre Preview

Trisha Gupta finds that Telugu theatre in Delhi has a long and interesting history.

Minutes away from the madness of the ITO intersection, in a relatively-quiet lane behind Azad Bhavan, a group of sari-clad women are gathered in a large, rather bare room. There is no colour, no ornamentation; nothing except the faded remains of a Rangoli pattern painted on the mosaic. Two women pace the floor, gesticulating as they speak, while two others listen attentively. One woman is playing with a child, while an older, bespectacled woman sits on a chair, occasionally interjecting, a stapled sheaf of handwritten pages in her hand. The script of a play.

The scene would be interesting enough in itself – a play being rehearsed by an all-female cast – but it becomes even more so when it’s in Telugu. The hall, in fact, belongs to the Andhra Vanita Mandali, an organization for Andhraite women in Delhi, and the rehearsal in progress is for a play called Savitri Sawal, to be staged this fortnight by the Dakshina Bharata Nata Natee Samakhya. Apart from Savitri Sawal, a comedy that draws on the Savitri Satyavan myth to poke fun at modern middle class life, the DBNN will also present a more serious play, Repati Satruvu (Tomorrow’s Enemy), about the problems of old age.

The DBNN (often referred to simply as the Samakhya) was founded in 1958 by five young men who had arrived in the capital to study acting at the then-new Asian Theatre Institute, which later became the National School of Drama. Of the five men, three were from Andhra Pradesh, including the young Kuppili Venkateswara Rao, who had already founded well-known theatre groups in his home state: the Navya Kala Mandali in his hometown Rajahmundry, and the Rasana Samakhya in Vijayawada, where he was then working as a clerk in the railways. Now armed with theatre scholarships from the government of Andhra Pradesh, K Venkateswara Rao and his friends K Prasad Rao (also known as Cinema Prasad) and ‘Radio’ C Rama Mohana Rao borrowed money to get to Delhi. Once here, the trio started watching theatre with a passion and dreamt of staging Telugu plays in Delhi. K V Rao’s reminiscences of those days include a story about how he watched a Bengali play directed by stalwart Shambhu Mitra at AIFACS. “I went backstage to find out the expenditure incurred for the production. When told that it was Rs 380, my throat (became) parched… I came back without a word,” he wrote.

The problem of money was solved by a combination of generous patrons and self-imposed thrift, and the Samakhya staged its first play, Narasuraaju’s Naatakam, in 1959. Plays were rehearsed everywhere, from houses where they were driven out by irate landlords, to Delhi’s myriad tombs. It was the Andhra Vanita Mandli that gave the group its first – and lifelong – proper rehearsal space. “There is no doubt that having this space has helped the group a lot,” said Anuradha Nippani, regular actress and ex-General Secretary of DBNN.

In the first decade of its existence, the Samakhya produced an astounding sixty plays. The enthusiasm of the 1950s lasted well into the 60s and 70s, with new talent being recruited from among the streams of Andhraites who continued to arrive in the capital in search of government jobs. “My father-in-law came to Delhi in 1946. Over the years, he brought his three brothers as well as his two brothers-in-law,” said Nippani, who grew up in Andhra Pradesh and only came to Delhi after marriage. Despite the fact that there are now some 16 lakh Telugu speakers in Delhi, NS Kameswara Rao, one of the group’s veteran members and director of Repati Satruvu, points out that Andhra theatre no longer has the kind of support it once did. “In the 70s and early 80s, our shows in Kamani and Shri Ram Centre ran to packed houses. We took our plays to neighbourhoods, Janakpuri and JNU alike. In 1979, we staged the first Telugu street play in Delhi. Participation has certainly decreased since then, both of actors and audience,” he said. Rao traced the dwindling numbers to the screening of Telugu films in Delhi, which started in 1984. “It is not only the case with Telugu theatre, of course. Until fifteen years back, people would at least go and watch films in a hall. Now, they only sit in their drawing rooms and watch on a small screen.”

The Samakhya continues to do at least two plays a year. “We always do original plays, written in Telugu. Usually they are socially relevant, about contemporary themes,” said Nippani. The diasporic context also plays a role in their choice of scripts. “Like last year, we did a play foregrounding the Telugu language, about a family who go abroad and forget Telugu,” said M Kusuma, who has been active in the Samakhya and the Vanita Mandli for some forty years, and is directing Savitri Sawal. “We have only one young person, Kritika, who is acting this time,” Nippani points out. “What we need is for more young people to show an interest. But theatre takes so much commitment. And even my own children don’t really speak Telugu.”

Published in Time Out Delhi, September 2007

Theatre Spaces: Akshara Theatre

Published as part of an occasional series on Delhi's theatre spaces, in Time Out Delhi. 

Most people in Delhi know Baba Kharak Singh Marg for its long line of emporia selling handcrafted goods from various Indian states, or the Hanuman Mandir. But very few are likely to know that it’s home to what is arguably Delhi’s most charming theatre. Or rather, theatres – there are two.

The plot of land on which Akshara now stands, including the original bungalow, was allotted by the government to dancer-actress Jalabala Vaidya and her husband, playwright-filmmaker Gopal Sharman, in 1972. “We had been contracted by the Royal Shakespeare Company to take our production, the Ramayana, to Britain, and we needed a space to rehearse and to perform. The house was leased to us as nationally eminent artistes, and we sought permission to hollow out a portion of the bungalow and build a 50-seat theatre,” says Jalabala Vaidya.

They got permission, and the indoor theatre was built in the same year – 1972. “We opened with a political satire, Let’s Laugh Again, in which we took the actual words of politicians and made them into a script. It was studded with these bon mots. And we charged tickets. In the beginning we found we weren’t getting audiences, because we weren’t inviting people. So Gopal started to design advertisements, beautiful ads but in the smallest size the newspapers would accept, which was 3cm by one column width.”

It helped. “People started to bring their own cushions and sit on the steps, because all the seats would be full,” says Vaidya. In the mid-80s, they succeeded in getting Akshara registered as a cultural society. In 1998, the indoor theatre was expanded to accommodate 100 people, and an outdoor theatre with 300 seats was constructed at one end of the garden. “The French and the Malayalis have often done shows here,” says Vaidya.

Until 2004, Vaidya and Sharman still performed frequently. Nowadays, the theatre is used for occasional performances by the children who’re part of Akshara’s Deeksha Program. Every Friday and Saturday, children between the ages of 5 and 15 come to Akshara to receive training in theatre through a combination of yoga, poetry, music and actual acting. “In February, the children did two plays – Rudyard Kipling’s The Butterfly that Stamped, and The Train To Darjeeling, which was written by my daughter Anasuya,” says Vaidya. “I’m now trying my level best to encourage young people to use the theatre. In March, a young group of university students did a production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead? We have our own technicians, so the lighting and sound will be professionally done, and we would only charge the actual costs – electricity and so on. I only want that they should be open and innovative. And that they do the play for a week, at least.”

Getting there: Follow Baba Kharak Singh Marg in the direction of Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital. Slow down when you see the sign for Gate No. 4 of the hospital. Akshara Theatre is right next to it.

Published in Time Out Delhi, 2008