Note: This review article was written in 2003. A more extensive version in Tamil was published in a Tamil little magazine.
It is the same phenomenon. It is the same drama acted all over again, everywhere. The same avantgarde, by virtue of not being in touch with the masses. The same felt obsession with a prolonged crisis and brief moments of attempts at resuscitation. An eternal recurrence of the same (not of difference, but with semblance of difference) propelled by modernity.
Any person having the leisure to reflect on the cultural milieu can come to notice the marked absence of the role of theatre everywhere. It is plain, written on the wall. The theatre is in crisis.
And the reasons are crystal clear. It is the same familiar story. The advent of the movies, then the television and now the digital technology, the first decisive blow early on from the movies. Time to time there would be serious attempts at resuscitation, in radical manifestos and then again a slump. Again the reasons are the same, simple but crucial: lack of funds and audience.
It would be on the ‘safe side’ to skip off the controversial and delicate matter of funding, and focus on the other crucial subject, the audience, the real ‘nightmare’. It is taken for granted, that the masses are immersed in the vulgar, popular medium of cinema and television, and they won’t turn out to the more serious and exacting art form of theatre. But, in spite of this derision of the cinema – at least of popular cinema – there is an explicit turn towards cinema in theatre, towards movement in its cinematic elements and more pronouncedly to strong visual images.
Could this turn to the cinematic, win back to it the audience the movies snatched away? (And what about the current dwindling of spectators away from the movies?) Could theatre make use of the cinematic, not simply for the sake of the audience, but to enhance its creative possibilities as an art form?
Arguments for and against this ‘turn’ were taken seriously among practitioners in the west and is still one of the main points of debate and dialogue. But in the Indian / Tamil context, the cinematic turn is taken for granted and practiced in problematic ways, at times to the detriment of theatre.
The staging of “Prahaladha Charitram” (July 22-31, 2003) by Koothu-p-pattarai Trust, in alliance with the Alliance Francaise of Chennai, at the latter’s premises, is just another instance of this mute practice, but has some interesting aspects which have to be fore grounded.
The play written by Na.Muthuswamy and directed by Gill Alon, explicitly foregrounds the question of the loss of audience and with particular reference to the traditional folk-theatre – koothu. It begins with an actor entering on-stage and announcing: [in those days] “Many people came to watch all these performances. Why do you think they came for these performances? Probably, to get blessings? But these days they don’t have faith in such things. So, the people will not come,” and ends with the same as lamentation.
But there remains the question of why, why have the audience lost interest in seeing “Prahalada Charitram” performed in the traditional form of theru-koothu, which was one of the staple forms of entertainment for centuries? Is it because simply they lost faith in such divine mythologies? Is the play only about faith?
Neither the play nor the playwright or the director probes further into the question, but immediately plunge into the traditional narrative, rendering it in a modern, up-to-date form: lightings, visual images, cinematic movements and frames, a little bit of social criticism, situations (a tea-shop chat). Probably, the implicit assumption is that, rendering the traditional modern would breathe life into the play and win back the audience.
Perhaps, one could arrive at the question, first by conceding the excellent use of the cinematic by the director. The scene depicting Prahaladha’s birth and the final scene in which the death of Hiranyakasibu is conveyed (not enacted) are particularly good in images and movement.
Leelavathi, gradually descends from persons holding her standing, down to the floor with shouts of agony and pain of giving birth to a child. The movement, her descending, is slow and intense and highly suggestive as an image depicting the process.
Hiranya’s death is conveyed as a message, but again in a highly suggestive visual image. The actors stand in a line with their backs facing the audience and the lighting casts a shadow of images of pillars on the black screen. A narrator comes to the front playing a drum, and narrates the message while one by one the ‘pillars’ fall with a thud. The movement is so intense that the audience are captivated by its full force. And, to climax it, with the last ‘pillar’ falling, two female actors, fall-in to the stage, from out-of -the-frame, which is cinematic par excellence.
To add one more instance, the scene in which Naradha meets Hiranya to get his permission to see Leelavathi, before her giving birth to Prahaladha, Naradha’s whole character is presented in a simple image (incense sticks plugged to his turban) and giving a soothing massage (bodily movement) to Hiranya.
Such visual images, cinematic movement and perspectives and framing in conjunction with the vibrant bodily movement that is the epitome of the theatrical space suggest the creative possibilities that can come out in a symbiosis of the two essentially different forms.
But, the instant images and movement are taken for their own sake and thrust into the theatrical space, they prop-out as a sham, a mere technique. For example, the scene in which the village doctor inquires her way to the palace, actors move in a diagonal, across the stage creating an illusion of movement-image, the basic form of cinematic image. The image serves no other purpose in the scene than to ‘communicate interestingly’ in images.
Theatrical space is essentially different from the cinematic space in that, it is about the vibrant bodily movement of live persons directly in front of an audience, and is inclusive of their emotional-inner movement. Making use of cinematic movement and perspectives will be effective and creative only if it is in symbiosis with this vibrant bodily movement. Otherwise it will exist within the theatrical space as a prop, a mere technique, a pretense.
The creative symbiosis of the cinematic with theatre is certainly a development in theatre as a form of art, but this does not suffice in its quest for regaining its lost audience. Theatre is also essentially about narratives – story telling.
Story-telling is always a remembering of a collective memory of a community. The greek tragedies, for example, were performed as a collective remembering of the cultural, religious experiences of that age. It appealed to them, in so far as they were about their values, enacted in the values of the heroes, upholding honor in the face of the inevitable fate. More to it, they were also initiation rites for the young men coming of age, to take them into the army as warriors and hence into citizenship. The tragedies were a reenactment of a collective memory, experience and a ritual of a community.
Could these tragedies, or classic texts in general, now taken up and performed in their same garb, in a milieu in which those values are long past and does not prevail?
If one could reinterpret the text, relating it to the recent past collective memories of the community. To illustrate the point, it would suffice to cite a case. Dusan Jovanovic, a Slovenian playwright and theatre director, in 1993, wrote a version of Antigone, responding to the war in Yugoslavia. He cast the conflict of Eteocles and Polynices as one which had been dragging on for a very long time, so long in fact that everyone had forgotten the original cause of the feud. Such reworking, rendering of the classic text of a distant past had a direct relevance to the contemporary, and served as an effective critical intrusion on the present, reflecting and giving voice to the collective trauma suffered by an historical community of people.
“Prahaladha Charitram” enacted for centuries among the agricultural populace has its own repertoire of collective memories and its own messages: no to evil – in its case, the usurpation of authority (by Hiranya), evil is powerful, hence contempt for power, the good is meek, perseverance in the wake of sufferings and so on. This moral package was given annually to the laboring agricultural populace, in a garb of divine myth, thereby ensuring their subjection to the feudal system of authority and power.
If the audience seems to have lost interest in such plays now, and a unique, culturally rich art form is in the danger of extinction, it is nothing but a reflection of the change in the social structure which sustained such audiences and forms of art. Of course, the masses have not shed faith altogether, only its traditional manifestations. Their perspectives have undergone radical change, and usurpation, challenging authority in subtle ways are all now part and parcel of their modern life.
But, the vestiges of faith still lingering on in their collective memories, does surely points to the fact that, such myths can sill be reworked, reinterpreted and enacted in the self-same traditional art forms in more innovative ways, albeit according to the playwright’s ideological slants. It cannot be, and should not be a simple re-invoking of the past, retelling the same story, in the same way.
The challenge dramaturgy facing today, is to rework, reinterpret the past, the myths that have lost their sustenance, yet lingering on in faded colors, in a way that touches the collective experiences of the present of a community, tangentially. Visual images and cinematic elements may enhance its formalistic potentialities, but a return to the text, inclusive of the social text, would be the decisive factor.
August 2003.
Filed under: Theatre
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