Reading: The right thing

Writers’ Bloc, India’s best loved new writing festival recently concluded at Prithvi and NCPA. The festival, in its 4th edition, is painstakingly put together by Rage Productions.

Every edition begins with inviting entries for early career playwrights to participate in a series of writing workshops with experts from the UK’s premiere new writing theatre, The Royal Court Theatre London (RCT). The short listed writers are mentored to create a brand new text which is then handed over to directors to convert into three-dimensions. Understandably, each festival takes almost 3 years to build. Writers’ Bloc has given us long running plays like Pune Highway, The President is Coming, Mahua, OK Tata Bye Bye and a few others. This year the plays presented are in English, Hindi, Marathi, and even Tamil.

As with every edition, the festival featured fully mounted productions of the brand-new scripts that have emerged out of the workshops. However there was an interesting new section this year as well: Staged Readings. There were four presentations where actors were holding scripts. Since they weren’t full productions, these performances had a representation of costumes, minor movement, virtually no set, basic furniture and excellent performances. Normally one views such readings with a certain tedium, and a ‘not really a play/experience’ attitude. But what was a pleasant surprise was how easily the plays leapt off the page and lodged in our imagination. Each reading had a different texture and a different purpose.

Nandita da Cunha’s The Pacman Pill directed by Trishla Patel was an exercise in airing out a new play to an audience, and then asking those present for comments and feedback. The play, created out of the Writers’ Bloc workshops, was steeped in medical and pharmaceutical jargon and took us to a new world. The stage directions, simply read, told us where we were and our imagination did the rest. The 75-minute performance in the tiny Prithvi House, kept us engaged and absorbed. It was a special treat to have a conversation with the writer about her influences. As an audience we felt we were part of the journey of this text becoming a proper play.

Arghya Lahiri and Akarsh Khurana were given the task to direct Iron by Rhona Munro and Anupama Chandrasekhar’s Disconnect respectively. These were to ticketed audiences. Both managed to create such a strong sense of stage design, that we barely noticed the absence of set or even the fact that the actors were holding scripts. Once again, unencumbered by the trappings of set or location we dove into the words the writer had put down. Some sections were gripping, some were not. The flaws that emerged were of the text and not necessarily of the production.

Contrasting these two was another script-in-hand performance, Nassim Suleimanpour’s White Rabbit, Red Rabbit. The premise of the play is that the actor is handed the text just as s/he walks on to stage. This was an even greater commune between writer and audience, because the words are not filtered by a director’s vision, a production designer or even the actors own rehearsed interpretation. This made for a fascinating, spontaneous, and powerful evening.

Having watched these four presentations, I can’t help but wonder the merits of staged readings to an audience for works-in-progress. Maybe this is something that Writers’ Bloc can include as a section before the plays are finally mounted into full productions. Since movement is limited and production design is minimal, the words are what carry the presentation, and therefore playwrights might get invaluable feedback about whether their text is ready or not. If anything, these four Staged Readings have made a strong case for playing a great role in the shaping of our future scripts.