On World Theatre Day, thespians reflect on the art form and how it has helped shape their lives

Rakesh Bedi, theatre director, actor, and playwright

Rakesh Bedi (File)

Theatre makes one fearless. A theatre actor is not afraid of any kind of work — you give them a script 15 minutes before the play, and they’ll portray the character with as much honesty as those who have been vigorously trained for it. Speech training, body movements, expressions, posture, is part of their daily training. Despite the biggest goof-up, a theatre actor will adapt and perform. Theatre also teaches you that there is an answer to everything, a solution to every problem. A theatre artist may feel clouded for a moment, but they know how to shake it off and move ahead. The discipline and commitment in theatre is unmatchable.

Himani Shivpuri, theatre actor, Sangeet Natak Akademi Award winner

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Theatre is a passion that does not fade; it stays forever. I started doing local theatre in Uttarakhand where I developed a love for the art. I passed out from the National School of Drama in 1982 and that’s when I began my professional career — and even after so many years, the love affair continues. Today, despite having other commitments in cinema and television, I’d give up anything for theatre, it’s my first love. This is why, I continued doing theatrical acts, just for the revival, the rejuvenation, the passion. Even today, I am actively engaged with it. I stay in touch with this art form in whichever way possible, including teaching it in various universities. Even during COVID, I was taking classes, directing plays.

Theatre is like oxygen to me. It is a wonderful training ground for an actor because you get so much time to rehearse, to get into the skin of a character.

Shilpi Marwaha, actor, director, Sukhmanch Theatre Group

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In today’s world, people are slowly losing a connection with each other. At this critical moment, theatre assumes an important role in our lives — one that helps keep connections alive. Often, we also tend to stray away from ourselves, but theatre forces us to have a conversation with ourselves too; for only a person who engages with oneself can engage with and imbibe a character. As such, every person should experience theatre at least once; it is a medium that makes you see beyond yourself. It is one of the only mediums that allows the performers and audience to interact and connect.

Atul Satya Koushik, theatre director and playwright

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The true relevance of World Theatre Day lies in understanding the changing aspirations our audience has from us, and how we are adapting to new ways of telling stories and exploring new ones, too. That is because we can’t go about telling old stories in the fashion they have already been told.

Theatre is my life. The most important thing theatre has given me is a canvas on which I can paint my stories. It gives me liberty to design my own world, characters and songs. It has given me a way to connect with thousands of people and reach out to them with my stories.

A. Mangai, theatre director, academician, playwright, and practitioner for 40 years

Theatre, as a space, provides me energy, excitement, creativity, sustenance and safety in many ways. It has remained my safe place. It has stood for democracy, a collective way of working, and a platform for being able to articulate what you want to. Unlike in Mumbai and Delhi, in Tamil Nadu, theatre has never been a commercial venture. We have audience patronage, primarily as appreciation, discussion, not necessarily financial. The most promising thing is, I find a lot of young people moving into theatre and bringing with them new technological knowledge while at the same time not making it mechanical.

What we need to notice and celebrate, is the number of women that are practising theatre today. In the early years, you could count the number of women in theatre, and now we can confidently say that women are as equal as men, not necessarily at the helm of theatre but as people who are part of theatre production in many ways and many of them have also sustained living through theatre in some form or other, be it applied theatre or theatre in education etc. The increase in the number of women in theatre demands a very qualitative change within the genre.

Feisal Alkazi, educationist, activist, theatre director, Ruchika

Feisal Alkazi (File) (extreme left)

Theatre is the reflection of the society we live in, and my endeavour as a director and practioner of the art is to hold up a mirror to the contemporary situation. Love for the art drives me to never stop pursuing theatre. As such, even during Covid, we did 40 productions online with audiences sometimes crossing 50,000.We at ‘Ruchika,’ which was started in 1972, are a ‘theatre family.’ We don’t do plays for commercial reasons, something that reflects our commitment to this art. We have also tried working in small and intimate set ups with just 50 audience members, it’s very satisfying and a great learning to perform plays in such spaces.

I’ve grown up in a family that has been closely associated with theatre. My father, Ebrahim Alkazi, was called the Father of Indian Theatre, and was the head of NSD for 14 years. I, too, have been associated with theatre for over five decades now.

Ashwath Bhatt, theatre director, actor

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For me, theatre is not just about staging a drama, it’s like a therapy. I always prefer to be called a theatre artist first and then a cinema actor. Theatre is where we have learnt, grown, experimented and refined ourselves. Any other medium happened much later. Theatre has opened a different perspective of life for me. I come from Kashmir and the importance of being able to express my emotion through various forms of theatre, increased my humaneness manifold. The nitty-gritties, dynamism, and thought provoking aspect of it not improves you as an actor but improves your life in general.

Even as the art is gradually finding takers, the artists are largely left to fend for themselves as no concrete government and civil society initiative is been taken to promote it and find solutions to make it a financially viable artform. Thus it gets sidelined as a ‘hobby’ for most theatre artists and rarely becomes their ‘profession.’

Ram Gopal Bajaj, former NSD Director, Padma Shri and Sangeet Natak Akademi Award winner

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Creating infrastructure for live art forms like theatre is the need of the hour. There seems to have been no progress on this front in the last 70 years. Just like parks and other amenities, theatre should also be allocated a budget by government. There should be more repertory companies or rang mandals for actors to just do theatre; right now they have no option but to switch to cinema. In schools too, there should be adequate theatre classes, much like dance and singing. The society’s attention needs to be accorded to theatre, and it should be stopped being given a ‘step-motherly’ treatment.

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