The Playwrights Lab

THEATRE writer-director Neel Chaudhuri had never followed any rules when it came to writing a play. The artistic director of the Delhi-based Tadpole Repertory would hold intimate workshops with his actors,where hed discuss and debate ideas,and develop them into scripts. Though this method held him in good stead,he was keen to train in playwriting. I never felt settled in my craft,and wanted to get some formal training in writing, he says. This landed him at the third edition of the Writers Bloc festival with his most structured play yet,Still and Still Moving,a love story between two men set in Delhi.

Chaudhuri is among 12 playwrights,including Abhishek Majumdar,Akash Mohimen,Ayeesha Menon,Irawati Karnik and Siddharth Kumar,to have been trained in playwriting for a year by Royal Court Theatre,Britains leading theatre company. The 12 were the finalists from over 100 applicants to Writers Bloc,a festival of new,original Indian plays. The plays are a culmination of the Writers Blocs year-long training programme,an initiative of Mumbai-based theatre production company,Rage Productions,and the Royal Court Theatre.

The 12-day-long festival takes off on Monday at Prithvi Theatre,Mumbai. It begins with Mohimens Mahua,which is about the fight against mining and industrialisation in a tribal village in Orissa. After its run at Prithvi,the festival moves to Mumbais National Centre for performing Arts (NCPA) and then,if Rage has its way,to Bangalore,Hyderabad and Delhi later this year.

Apart from being fresh and original,the stories are distinctly Indian,the mandate given to us,says Chaudhuri. The Djinns of Eidgah,written by Majumdar,is a story of two children stranded in Kashmirs impasse. Karnik and Swatanshu Bora explore Indian urban life in their plays Once on that Street and Satellite City respectively. Menon captures the effects of redevelopment on a small colony in Bandra in Pereira Bakery on 76 Chapel Road.

Since its debut in 2004,Writers Bloc has produced 32 original Indian plays. Actor Shernaz Patel,who founded Rage along with adman and theatre personality Rahul da Cunha and actor Rajit Kapur in 1993,says,Not much original writing was happening in Indian theatre. The idea behind Writers Bloc was to nurture Indian playwrights and plays related to India.

Some of the writers have tried new forms during the training. Purva Naresh,for example,stepped out of her comfort zone of musicals to write a dialogue-driven Ok Tata Bye Bye. In Spunk,Siddharth Kumar offers a very unusual protagonist a man whose body produces special semen. The plays are in English,except Annie Zaidis Hindi thriller Jaal,OK Tata Bye Bye (both English and Hindi) and two Marathi plays,Shillak and Natak Nako,by Sagar Deshmukh and Dharamakirti Sumant respectively.

Writers Bloc came up in 2003,when Paul Smith,the then head of the British Council,Mumbai,suggested that playwrights in India should benefit from training. The inaugural edition of the festival took place in April 2004,showcasing nine new plays over 18 days. The next Writers Bloc happened in January 2007,and showcased 11 new plays across 24 days.

The Writers Bloc training is rigorous. Writers are selected on the basis of their entries,mostly their previous works. In a fortnight-long residential workshop in Vasind near Nashik,they develop an idea for a script. The teachers from the Court guide them in writing a few pages of the script through writing exercises,analyses of plays and actors enactment of the words. Then,the writers return home to work on their initial drafts,which are sent to the Court for their observations. They meet again at a residential workshop to develop the scripts. They submit their final drafts after reworking and revising them according to the Courts feedback. Only the scripts that fully satisfy the Court are presented in a festival, says Patel,adding that of the 40 writers selected initially,12 made it to the festival.

Zaidis script was in the danger of being yanked. Somehow,it was not working. My script had a lot of abstract and poetic elements, she says. She had to work from scratch and come up with a brand new script in two months before the final submission. On the other hand,Karniks play was a surprise inclusion. She was at the workshop to translate Marathi plays into English for the Court. In her free time,the Mumbai-based theatre person,who was trained during the 2007 Writers Bloc,started writing a new play. The trainers were impressed by her script and included it in the final list. This is my second play at Writers Bloc after Altoon Paltoon,which was in Marathi. Since my new play happens to be my first in English,it felt like going through the process afresh, she says.

Living together and working on plays in a group bred friendships as well as better understanding of each others craft. The playwrights often exchanged notes and helped each other when they got stuck while working on a scene or building a character. Bangalore-based Majumdar,who has such acclaimed plays as Harlesden High Street and An Arrangement of Shoes to his credit,bonded well with Karnik and Chaudhuri. The latter became the sounding board for Natak Nako and Sillak,despite not being proficient in Marathi.

What most writers have gained from the training are the tools that give plays a structure. These tools have made da Cunha,who attended the Writers Bloc 1,rethink his dialogues and their appropriateness in a theatre presentation. Majumdar talks about rewriting more than writing. This has increased my set of conscious choices and given me a more critical eye, he adds. For Zaidi,the biggest change in her writing has come from her ruthlessness. I am no longer self-indulgent, she says and counts learning the skills of moving the action forward and character motivation as other gains.

In fact,da Cunhas experience sums up the after-effects of Writers Bloc the best. He had already written his first and popular Class of 84 when he attended the first Writers Bloc. After writing Pune Expressway under the watchful eye of the trainers,he considers himself to be a better director now. Even though I have not strictly followed the Royal Courts method of writing after that,the rules laid down by them are ingrained in my mind,and have exposed me to a lot of possibilities, he says.