Ratan Thiyam: Outspoken theatre director who forced audiences to reconsider stereotypes of heroes, villains

Anuradha Kapur, a theatre maker and the former Director of the National School of Drama (NSD) in Delhi, India’s prominent academy for theatre studies, says that from the 1950s to the 1970s, words were seen to be the primary means to tell a story on stage. “Thiyam staged Chakravyuh in 1984, and made his spectators understand the magic of the visual in theatre. He made us aware of a composite theatre image, which uses costume light music vocalisation and percussion to together create absolute magic. To me, this sort of image making is the heart of theatre,” she says.

In Uttar Priyadarshi, the entrance of an elephant, and, in Chakravyuh, the movement and glancing red light that created the violence of the vyuh, are memorable. “His use of light is unmatched: sometimes illuminating just the hands and raised arms of a moving group., sometimes lowering the intensity so much that only the glints in costume were visible. Sometimes, the starling white of a ceremonial cloth umbrella appeared to float past us. Thiyam’s work created poetry on stage. Many of Thiyam’s images will remain in one’s mind as a kind of jewel glittering in the memory,” says Kapur.

Ratan Thiyam was one of the leading figures in the Theatre for Roots, a post-Independence theatre movement. (Photo: Express Archive)

Thiyam was one of the leading figures of Theatre of Roots, a post-Independence movement of decolonisation in which artists returned to their culture and traditions to create works. Kapur remembers watching plays in which the actors glided over the stage with movements drawn from Manipuri traditions, such as Thang-Ta. “He played with very fluid movements and redefined movement in drama. The plays had choreography and music but were not musicals. Thiyam broke the bounds and was able to make us look at the proscenium as a framed space of magical images,” she says.

It is significant that Thiyam, who spoke six languages and understood eight, made plays only in Manipuri and presented these without subtitles all over the world. He was one of the earliest directors to regularly show his plays on international platforms. Thiyam was the first winner from India of the prestigious Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh International Theatre Festival in 1987.

Was Thiyam’s intuitive understanding of the elements of performance due to his birth? His parents, Manipuri classical dancers Thiyam Tarun Kumar and Bilasini Devi, were on tour in Nabadwip, West Bengal, when Thiyam was born. He grew up travelling with them, playing in green rooms and the wings as some of the most powerful artistes of Manipur went over their lines and craft. “I was soaking it all in, though I didn’t realise it then. This was also the time that I learned to observe people, from the pedestrians to the policemen,” he once said. Thiyam honed his craft at NSD, where he also became a Director.

Thiyam’s politics, to a large extent, came from books, especially those of Che Guevara. As a child, he dreamed of travelling to Cuba to become a revolutionary. Thiyam carried the zeal into his life in theatre. He created plays when “ideas start knocking on my head and giving a kick to my buttock”. As an artist, he was affected by events in society and this is what his plays revealed. His great tragedies, Karnabharam (1976) and Urubhangam (1981), showed the antagonists of the Mahabharata, Karna and Duryodhana, as heroes. The people of Manipur were locked in a struggle against security forces – and Thiyam’s plays forced audiences to reconsider their stereotypes of heroes and villains.

Thiyam’s son, Thawai Thiyam, says that the director was planning to stage a Greek play, before his health deteriorated. While we do not know the details of this project, Thiyam left an urgent message for the audience way back in 2020, when global warming was not a buzzword. He had staged Lairembigee Eshei (The Song of the Nymphs) for the closing ceremony of the 21st Bharat Rang Mahotsav, the international theatre festival organised by NSD. In the play, a hedonistic king, who fells trees and destroys nature, is cursed by mother nature with an incurable disease. “It may be helpful for us to go back to nature and try to understand what it wants to give to you. Nature provides us with a lasting form of pure energy but we are ignoring it,” Thiyam had said at the time.