Back to the Page
- Meghna Roy Choudhury
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
It all started when one of my all-time favourite actors said, “I don't want to be working in ballet or opera or things where it's like, 'Hey, keep this thing alive!' even though no one cares about this anymore”.
For context, Timothée Chalamet said this in a conversation with Matthew McConaughey. I had watched the interview long before the backlash escalated, before “lil’ timmy tim” was being denounced, before the Seattle Opera started offering discounted tickets with the promo code TIMOTHEE.
But his words stayed with me. I had heard somewhere that someone important once said that theatre is dead, and that we just don’t know about it. I remember not sleeping that night. Perhaps because I had already given up so much, and a part of me feared they might be right.
I have forgotten the last time I sat down to write a script. Even writing this essay feels unfamiliar. These days, all I seem to do is write clever Instagram captions, promoting a play I wrote a year ago, Kheyechish?, or two years ago, The Apology, or three years ago, Kadambari. These thoughts were running through my mind during the tech rehearsals of Kadambari at META. I was nominated for Best Original Script, and all I could think was an echo of Tagore in Kadambari, “Me? I don’t write anymore.”
Within a week, I was en route from Delhi to Kolkata, where the Third Bell weekend was to take place from the 3rd to the 5th of April. My goal was to go back to where it all began, where it always begins - writing, playwriting. And I had a smaller, more immediate goal: to prove to Harshini, the superwoman of Hear, Here and Picnic with Playwrights, a true Delhite, that momos are better in Kolkata.
Three days of a rigorous playwriting workshop at The Urban Theatre Project with seven shortlisted playwrights and Irawati Karnik. As the AQI dropped, so did something within me. The serpentine question of whether theatre is even relevant in this fractured world began to loosen its grip. I slipped into student mode. I may have been leading the program, but I found myself in desperate need of being a student again, going back to where it all began. And Ira remains the finest facilitator I have known.
The first day was a long one, stretching from 11 AM to 8 PM., It began with playful writing exercises and icebreakers, and in one of them I realised it was perhaps not so normal to not have imaginary characters lingering in your head; everyone else in the room seemed to have one except me. The playwrights had come prepared with five minute pitches, though almost everyone exceeded the limit, each trying to advocate for their story with urgency and care.
The pitches were structured around a set of questions (which budding playwrights may want to take note of):
who is this play about
what do they want
what stands in their way
where and when does the story take place
how are time and space significant
what is the form and why
what are the personal, philosophical and political questions being explored
what is still undecided
where does the struggle lie
Ira used portions of the DASArts feedback method for each playwright’s work - after every pitch the group would ask questions and the presenting playwright could choose three to respond to.
And then came the most exciting part - the playwright would turn their back as if they were no longer in the room, (Anindeta, the playwright joining us online from Dhaka, switched off her camera) and then the room opened up. Everyone started to discuss what they felt the play was grappling with, what might be holding it back, what felt alive, what choices were worrying, and where in the process the work seemed to be.
This wasn’t exciting because it felt like a gossip session, it was exciting because it felt like something I had been missing in Mumbai for the past year, generous, unafraid, constructive and moderated criticism. At a time when every two years feels like a new generation and a new political wave, it occurred to me that we need to keep creating spaces like this, not just mourn their loss as we often do.
This was followed by a reading of Love and Money by Denis Kelly, chosen for its intriguing and if I may say so, rather thought-bending form and relationship with time.
Something I left out… The participants had been asked to read The Laramie Project by Moises Kaufman and The Tectonic Theatre Project (2000) so that it could be referenced throughout the three days. I had not read it before, I found myself reading it on the flight and late into the night before the workshop and it opened up a new world in my subconscious, even weeks later something in me is still churning because of that play. The Laramie Project presents a deeply complex portrait of a community's response to the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man living in Laramie, Wyoming, I would categorise this as a political play. It gave me a strange, quiet hope that theatre might not be so useless or redundant after all, that it still holds a certain kind of power.
Back to the programme. One would think that the first day would have resolved many doubts, as the playwrights themselves admitted, but at the start of the second day it became clear that it was all ‘ghente gha’, loosely translated to ‘khichdi’, everything mixed, messy, unresolved. Ira simply dove into the mess, and the playwrights followed, while I, almost instinctively and a little slyly, shifted from student mode back into project leader mode, slipping into logistical tasks, clicking pictures for the feed, helping Ninad and Harshini as they prepared for Hear, Here.
The day unfolded in the act of untangling - plotlines, events, structures, time, space, each play slowly revealing its own internal logic or lack of it, and by the end of it, something had begun to settle across all seven works. My takeaway, theatre is a medium of arguments.
The last day of the Third Bell weekend felt blessed with lady luck, just out of a play, Kolkata received a Kalbaishakhi brishti, the mango showers, and I would like to believe it arrived just in time so that we could hold Picnic with Playwrights on the terrace. The temperature dropped, the air softened, and everyone sat with daaber jol, coconut water in hand, reading excerpts from plays that had inspired them and from their own writing. The morning slowly gave itself to music, with songs sung by my favourite actor from Santoshpur Anuchintan, Nayan, who turned to me and said, “See, I kept my word, I sang…” And then, just like that, it was over, and we were back to work, back to where it all began, the page, the paper.
It was the last day, and the seven playwrights had moved ten steps ahead and seven steps back, but they were ready, their homework done, no longer afraid that their entire play, their plot, their structure was changing. Throughout the day, from time to time, a playwright, one by one, would come up to me and express immense gratitude for organising the workshop, they said they had never learnt so much in so little time, and in those moments there was a quiet sense of gratitude for me too, a reminder of how much I love this work, this work of building bridges between people I work with in Mumbai and the people I come from in Kolkata, through something that gives me pleasure and purpose… Writing plays.
My highlight from the last day was watching Ira return to her instincts from her time at the Sir J. J. School of Art, sketching scenes from all seven plays; I did not miss a single chance to photograph that moment.
Was lil timmy tim right? I don’t know. Was I able to convince Harshini that Kolkata has the best momos? I think she is just being a stubborn Delhite. Does theatre matter? I don’t know, and right now, that question feels a little overworked, almost tired from being asked too often, for too many reasons.
After three days of thinking, arguing, unravelling and rebuilding, what stays with me is something quieter and more certain, the anticipation of two new Bangla plays being born, and alongside that, a community of playwrights that has taken shape, people who can now rely on each other, who know how to offer honest, constructive criticism, who know how to stay with each other’s work, and for now, that feels like enough.
Like Ira said, even Vijay Tendulkar did not know what his writing would become, what Shantata! or Sakharam Binder would become, so perhaps thinking about the future of theatre is a futile exercise. I do not know.
Speaking of Tendulkar, something else he once said comes to mind, that one can only hope their play does not remain relevant, because one would rather the world change for the better. But until it does, I suppose that our job is simply to return to the page and write.
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