A merchant of drama

Issue-based theatre is very relevant today. But it has to be done with finesse and restraint, or else it can become preachy and defeat its own purpose. Shanta Gokhale explains

When Mahesh Dattani’s play 30 Days in September completed 100 shows recently, I thought of the late Vijay Tendulkar’s essay: In memory of the play I did not write.

The thought wasn’t as irrelevant as it might seem. 30 days in September is an issue-based play; the play Tendulkar did not write was also to have been issue-based.

Dr Shivajirao Patwardhan, founder of Tapovan, the ashram for leprosy patients, had made a fervent plea to him. “If you write at all about this visit, let it not be about me or the ashram. Let it be a play about the lives of your brothers and sisters here. You have a powerful pen. A play like Sakharam Binder would go a long way in changing society’s attitude towards these
unfortunate people.”

But Tendulkar never could write that play, despite having been deeply moved by his visit to Tapovan. In his essay, he confesses to being incapable of writing on commission. “My plays take off from some personal experience, pain or thought that pushes itself onto the paper and a play ‘gets written’.”

Dattani has also written plays that originate in a personal impulse. But equally, he has written highly successful commissioned plays by getting into the given issue and making it his own. “It’s a matter of artistic choice,” he says. “If it weren’t, the play would end up being didactic.”

The crucial factor in an issue-based play or film is how information is communicated. Is the audience allowed to glean it through the natural interactions of characters, or is it thrust on them? In Sumitra Bhave’s otherwise admirable film Devrai, in which Atul Kulkarni gives a monumental performance as a schizophrenic, the sister is treated to a huge chunk of information by the psychiatrist, entirely for the benefit of the audience.

The sheer size of the chunk not only damages the flow of the narrative but, worse still, damages the truth of the sister’s character. For the space of that visit to the psychiatrist’s clinic she is no longer the intelligent, well-informed, anxious and concerned sister we’ve met, but a vehicle for transporting information.

While that kind of thing doesn’t happen in 30 Days in September, something else does in Dattani’s post-Mumbai riots play, Final Solutions, which needs looking at.

There is a symmetrical balance here between good and bad Hindus and good and bad Muslims, which makes the play schematic One knows how tricky it is to handle political issues in our times, given that ‘hurt sentiments’ can turn violent at the drop of a hat.

But Dattani states categorically that he is not trying to placate anybody. “Flip flopping between failings on both sides of the fence agitates the audience’s comfort zone,” he says, “till they (hopefully) are forced to look at the larger picture.”
30 days in September is not a public play like Final Solutions.

Its confinement within the four walls of a middle-class home intensifies the deafening silence that surrounds the problem of child abuse. The victim is full of shame and guilt. Her nearest and dearest are in denial. The play reveals how this warps the victim’s relationship with herself and others.

In a recent interview, Nandana Sen recalls what happened when she played the role of the abused girl. “After the first show, a girl with tears in her eyes, hugged me and said that she felt she’d just seen herself in a mirror. That was the first time she had actually broken her own silence about her trauma.”

Yes, commissioned, issue-based plays can be successful, but only when the playwright is conscious of the pitfalls and has the requisite skill to overcome them.

If Dattani’s criterion of ‘artistic choice’ constitutes one part of this success, the other part is surely a high level of craftsmanship. Is that what Dattani is referring to when he calls himself ‘a merchant of drama’.