Life Imitating Art

The choice of play is often a critical moment for any theatre group.

Commercial production houses have it easier because their marker is quantifiable: Will it sell tickets Sometimes they have to pick a play that’s appropriate for the marketable cast that they have lined up.

In the non-commercial theatre the reasons are a little more varied.

Directors, rather than producers, usually make the call here. The reasons for picking a particular story or text could range from wanting to be part of a festival like the current Writers’ Bloc, to furthering the art, to simply enjoying a text, to telling a true story in dramatic form like 7/7/7 or even Nirbhaya.

What is universal however, is feeling that when working on a play, there is a kind of serendipity that occurs. Suddenly every headline seems to be connected to the text you are working on. If you are working on King Lear, there will be some story about how a parent was ill-treated by their children; if you are working on Nagamandala, then about how a woman in a village was made to prove her virtue. The reason for this is because most of the time we are immersed in a play. For the three months of rehearsals we eat and sleep nothing else. Therefore the stories that leap out from the newspapers or from television or even from friends are the ones that connect with our current obsession.

However recently I have been working on a play that goes well past just making one aware of stories that have always existed. A Peasant of El Salvador, was started as a cautionary tale of a country ripped apart by unequal economic policies and corruption. What we thought was a story of solidarity with the farming community has sadly become almost prophetic.

The play opened in 2013 and has performed intermittently since then. However every time we have regrouped for rehearsals we have discovered that the play is more relevant than before, almost reflecting the times we live in currently.

From farmers being robbed of their livelihood, to export agriculture, to the unprosecuted assassination of free thinkers, to presentation of the land acquisition act in Parliament, to the government’s interference in educational institutions, the play reads like a hand book of what to do if you want to build an oppressive regime. Tragically, India seems to be reading the hand book. The latest being the labelling of critics as “anti-national”. While in El Salvador the term slur was communist, the parallels are too overt to ignore.

The purpose of the play was never to critique the current political regime in India. It started off as a presentation of a social concern. But when the regime begins to resemble the dystopia you are presenting, it is incredibly disconcerting. Given the current climate, the real question might be how much longer will they allow stories such as these to be told

Who knows We will just play each show as if it is our last.