‘Directors and producers reluctant to acknowledge lesser known playwrights’
The playwright feels theatre should be better promoted across the country and believes art helps raise human empathy levels
Communal tension, samesex love, child abuse and patriarchy — playwright Mahesh Dattani’s plays portray everyday tragedies, his characters never cease to be human. They are seldom in the extreme, preferring to tiptoe somewhere in between. Perhaps that’s what makes them so easily relatable. And maybe that’s why theatregoers eagerly await his productions.
Dattani says any theatre is limited by the scope of its language and the term ‘elitist’ has done a great disservice to English language theatre.
“Let us not forget there are 80 million English speaking Indians and that certainly is not a small number. If at all we have to define the region of Indian English, I would use the word ‘urban’ and not ‘elitist’. Elitism has existed in the country for thousands of years,” he asserts.
The country’s first English language playwright to be awarded the Sahitya Akademi award, Dattani, who recently revived his Bangalore-based theatre group Playpen and, along with Brinda Shankar, started its Mumbai chapter, has lately been busy mentoring new playwrights.
“Playwrights need nurturing and sadly there are very few avenues open to them to be a part of a process. We also need to acknowledge playwrights properly in our publicity as the owners of the work. Many directors and producers are reluctant to do that unless the writer is a star,” he shares.
Though there are literature and film festivals, he says the country lacks theatre festivals and lauds the efforts of the Kerala government to promote the art. “I am really pleased to learn the Kerala government has earmarked a generous grant for theatre development in the state budget,” adds Dattani, who has to his credit critically acclaimed plays like Final Solutions, Bravely Fought the Queen, Thirty Days in September, The Big Fat City and The Murder That Never Was.
His new play, Snapshots of a Fervid Sunrise, staged in Mumbai recently, is about two lesser-known revolutionaries, Khudiram Bose from Bengal and Thillayadi Valliammai, a South African Tamil, both teenage martyrs who died fighting British rule.
Emphasising it is important for artistes to take a stand, he adds, “Our battle is against insensitivity and life-negating values.”
The agenda of art is to offer human experiences that raise empathy levels.
MAHESH DATTANI PLAYWRIGHT