Upstaging the writer

At one end, plays without words or a formal plot can be brilliantly evocative. De La Guarda, a play that took New York by storm last year, takes place above the heads of the audience. It starts with shadows above a white screen that the performers rip through, raining water and confetti and picking up people from below to take them on breathtaking trapeze swings. Performers race up and down the sheer walls to the sound of primordial beats and screams leaving the audience with an indescribable energy. Two years ago, a play on the tragedy of Yugoslavia had people walking on stilts, flaming torches, whips and burning shirts — a trifle literal perhaps but effectively gloomy. Pondicherry-based director Veenapani Chawla’s latest work, Ganpati, evokes the idea and myth of the elephant god largely through physical gestures and drum beats.

For the most part, however, plot-less plays in the sense described above tend to be without drama. There is a great reliance on props and other media. The French, Ubu, had a couple enacting a whole play within a play with vegetables as the characters; the recent Fish, from Northern Ireland used film footage as a backdrop and loud music. Other plays tend to rely overly on the actors’ skills as dancer, musician and so on. And still others that follow a more straightforward narrative path end up being insipid slices of life. The experience of a play is being brought increasingly close, either to dull, mundane, life or to that of a variety entertainment act where the skills of juggler, magician and mime artist are on display. And while some of it can be entertaining it has its limits. Why is this happening? What has caused this return-to-the-basics approach?

To some extent I believe the patterns apparent in the random collection of plays echoes wider socio-cultural trends. One is the idea of convergence, of artists in one media using elements from or even making forays into other media. The other is the cult of the individual and the sway of pop psychology/therapy, which have combined to give greater significance to personal fantasies than ever before. Both phenomena contribute to the diminished importance of skill. That an artist may be a lousy photographer does not necessarily stop him from taking pictures and exhibiting them nor does someone’s inner life have to be translated into art, according to current practice, for the purposes of narration. Then there is the spread of education in the arts — writing courses for instance particularly in America that tend to diminish the role of inspiration and talent. There are even computer programmes that can help you write a story or a script. Some call it democracy; others, a `dumbing down’ of culture.

The specific rejection of the writer’s role, however, is a curious phenomenon. To some extent it can be explained particularly in cinema as a succumbing to technology. Special effects and the excitement over new user-friendly gadgets have overwhelmed plot. Compare the Bond films of recent times with earlier ones, for instance, and the difference is clear. But technology alone is not the culprit. Indian cinema these days does not accord a role to the writer which it did even in the seventies, when Salim-Javed produced their best-known work. Nor does one hear of lyricists, although music directors are celebrated in their own right.

Directors, both in film and in theatre, complain about the lack of good writers. but with interference from directors or even directors writing their own scripts, there doesn’t appear to be much recognition of writing or plot creation as a separate specialisation. Perhaps there is another reason for this. Perhaps everyone just wants to tell their own stories. But is that necessarily a good thing?

Indian cinema these days does not accord a role to the writer which it did even in the ’70s