Theatre, of the people, for the people

How often is it that audience get to have their say in the creation of a play? When it comes to Theatre Space Collective (TSC), let’s just say , quite often. The group of theatre practitioners in Delhi have been trying to create possibilities for a new vocabulary for performace making with content that’s relevant and thought provoking. The core team, comprising Anannya Tripathi, Dhwani Vij, Neel Sengupta and Rahul Tewari, founded TSC with the aim of seeing what theatre can do, to have more conversations where one can safely disagree. So apart from staging plays, they also work a lot with children and different communities including doctors, engineers, teachers, working women, housewives and others, taking theatre to the mohallas and community centres of Delhi.

Audience as co-creators

A good two or three months before they open a play, TSC starts a series of curated conversations around the theme in different parts of the city. “The idea is to have the audience’s involvement not just as a viewer but also as someone who is contributing to the idea of the play. It’s a collective in that sense as well,” says Neel. A feedback they have often received after their shows, is that their performances don’t easily explain themselves to the audience. “They are there to be worked with, which is also essentially the idea of the collective. It’s not me as a character or the performer who has the authority over the meaning of the performance. It’s the audience who watches it who creates the meaning with me,” adds Dhwani. The conversations around the theme come handy with infusing the play with people’s ideas. “Hence, the audience is not just the consumer but co-creators of the work,” she says.

Play it again 

Till now, the group has performed four plays, including Love, Prufrock and Pascualnama (Commissioned by Instituto Cervantes, Embassy of Spain), which they are performing in Mumbai as a double bill for the first time. Neel, who has directed the former, tells us that while the performance has been inspired by TS Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, they didn’t want to directly adapt the text. “The idea that evolved was that Prufrock is not a person, it’s a feeling, that you suddenly have and it disappears, where you ask yourself what you are doing here, that we call ‘Being Prufrock’. Our play is an exploration and investigation of urban landscapes and when and how we feel like Prufrock within those spaces,” he explains.
 
As for Pascualnama based on La familia de Pascual Duarte by Camilo Jose Cela, a landmark novel in Spanish literature, director Dhwani tells us that the physical performance has evolved a lot since the first time they performed it. “Now, we are looking at the relationship Pascual shared with his mother and his wife, but the meta-narrative is his relationship with the story itself,” she adds. Next in pipeline is an adaptation of French playwright’s play Rhinoceros. “We are planning to translate it into Hindi and place it in the world around us,” she concludes. 

Each double bill will last for two hours. There will be an interval of 15 minutes between the two plays. The plays will be staged at Tamaasha Theatre on April 14, at 5 pm and 8 pm and at Castiko Space on April 15 at 6 pm and 9 pm.