Out of Box

Lately,there have been some changes that have altered the look and feel of plays and the audience’s demand from theatre in general. “About 10 years ago,we lacked the infrastructure and technology,” says Swanand Barve,playwright- director and co-founder of theatre group Shabdamegh. By infrastructure,Barwe means “safe transportation facilities to carry the sets and sophisticated methods to preserve it for reuse”.

Barve notices that the audience too has become very demanding. “If the scene is based in a hospital ward,the audience wants a nuanced mimicry by the set of the ward,” says Barve,elaborating with an example from his play Adyant Zaryawar Ratri,which was staged earlier this month at Sudarshan Rangmanch. The play focuses on the stories of two girls who have met after 11 years in the US. The set,thus,had to boast of American interiors. “Images on Google gave us an idea of their aesthetics of interior decoration,” he says.

Barve also attributes much change to Marathi dramatists’ exposure to international platforms,which demand DVDs of Indian plays be made available abroad. The plays get judged on the parameters of content and visual sophistication. Dharmadhikari of Naatak Company has staged his plays Geli-21-Varsha and Chakra in Italy and the Czech Republic respectively. A trip to Europe opened his eyes to the shortcomings of Indian platforms. Dharmadhikari recalls the grandeur of the National Theatre and Queen’s Theatre. “These theatres are huge with ceilings going up to six storeys. They have rotating and battery-operated stages,” he recalls,adding,“Such facilities can take presentation to unprecedented levels.”

Dharmadhikari too sees the conventional rectangular box-shaped stages here as restrictive of creative freedom. “These stages don’t encourage one to think out-of-the-box,literally,” he says. An experimental dramatist hence,according to him,does not have an option but to relocate his stage to other,more allowing venues,because “a compromise on sets only results in a verbose,speech-heavy play”.

“But experimentation with sets isn’t just this generation’s doing,” says Chandrakant Kulkarni,playwright and director with a career spanning over 30 years. Kulkarni recalls the organic and communicative sets that the Marathi past-masters created. A traditionalist,he is still a patron of craftsmanship. “Technology ka upyog toh sirf waqt ka takaza hai (What is technology but a trend of the times),” he says.