After five years of not making a play but only teaching, and experiencing India’s sociopolitical turmoil, one of India’s leading theatre directors and thinkers, Abhilash Pillai, is in a kalari, a traditional martial arts pit in Kerala, ready to break his silence. With him are 20-25 actors, dancers and circus artistes. Pillai is putting the final touches to the play, Oru Poomala Katha, a retelling of the mythical narrative of the Samudra Manthan in which the devas are faced with an existential challenge while the asuras represent the clans that are treated as perpetrators. “I am beginning to feel free. When the actors and dancers come out and the scene opens up, with everybody’s thoughts flowing, I realise that this is what I am in the field for,” he says. The play, scripted by Sasikumar V, will open on January 19 at the Ragbag festival, an event showcasing performance art, theatre, puppetry, food, craft and music from different countries in Thiruvananthapuram. Oru Poomala Katha is one of the final performances. In the play, the sage Durvasa turns into a storyteller and clown who traverses through time; Vishnu is a strategist who acts in different frequencies and resembles surveillance and surveillance technology of the digital era, and Shiva is a sacrificial face who, to the public mind, is capable of even swallowing potent venom. “This is the story that we are trying to find in the churning of the ocean, where the ocean means imagination and memory,” says Pillai. Pillai’s theatre is subversive; he is interested in provoking establishments and challenging audiences to think. He was a student at the National School of Drama (NSD) in Delhi when he made the play, Lanka Lakshmi, in 1994, using recordings of real riots in the soundtrack. He followed it up with This Man is Yourself in 1995, in which actors poured kerosene on books symbolising holy texts and set them on fire. One of his most powerful and disturbing plays was Verdigris (2000), a comment on the caste system told through the history of toilet cleaning in India. The last time Pillai made a major production — Anth Se Aarambh for the Mohan Rakesh Natya Samaroh in Delhi — he was Dean (Academics) at NSD. It had one show before Covid closed theatres in 2020. But it was also a time of upheaval at the school not just because theatre is difficult to teach over Zoom. “The whole scenario was changing at NSD. One of the world’s best institutions was focusing on fulfilling the government’s agenda rather than critically looking at their actions. NSD is a completely government-funded institution but people of my generation believe that we need to look at our leaders from a very healthy, critical point of view. This, eventually, helps the government run the country better. That kind of criticality was being lost at the NSD and there was no longer space for healthy criticism of different policies,” he says. “As a senior faculty member, I was putting my whole energy into tussles rather than creating plays,” he adds. When the news broke that Pillai was leaving NSD to join as Director of the School of Drama & Fine Arts, Calicut University, Kerala, it felt that the artist behind bold, anti-establishment plays was leaving Delhi to escape the heat. The School of Drama & Fine Arts has given some stellar artists to Kerala theatre and cinema, so Pillai invested the last few years in upgrading the curriculum to include the latest research, Artificial Intelligence and circus. He introduced the International Festival of Theatre Schools, where some of the world’s best drama teachers and students meet every year to share pedagogy, difficulties, commonalties, sorrows and happiness. “We couldn’t dream of doing this at NSD,” says Pillai. He has been a wanderer since childhood. Pillai likes to call his family “guinea pigs of Jawaharlal Nehru’s nation-making exercise”. His father was with the Song and Drama Division of the Central government in the 1960s and ’70s and responsible for registering the folk forms of the different states and organising events. All the art forms were rooted to their regions but Pillai, the child who was constantly on the move, found a connection with the circus. Unlike other art forms that unfolded horizontally, the circus explored the vertical space. Circus was a part of Pillai's PhD. It became the medium of his large-scale plays, including a circus series and Talatum, based on William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Oru Poomala Katha has subaltern subtext with flying acts, jugglery and ring acts, among others. “I have been thinking that the time has come for theatre makers to go beyond political and social concerns and be more responsible. We have faced a pandemic and our responsibility now lies in talking about the ecology. Artistes have one more box to tick, which is ecology. Is my play helping the environment? How many plastic chairs am I using? We need to ask these questions,” he says. Oru Poomala Katha, with the ocean, a mountain and a snake at the centre, is his message for contemporary times.
