It was a foggy winter morning in 2011. Shrouded figures on the streets were warming their hands on the dying embers of small fires lit overnight. Beauty and adversity made their presence felt in Delhi simultaneously. At this dramatic hour of the day, when the city was still waking up, I found myself at the end of a serpentine queue at the National School of Drama (NSD) waiting for the tickets to the annual Bharat Rang Mahotsav to go on sale. The lineup featured an assort ment of non-verbal, gibberish, experimental and multilingual productions from India and abroad.
Being part of the queue was an education in itself. Veteran theatre goers held forth on the history of NSD and the plays staged during the time of Ebrahim Alkazi. A 70-year-old gentleman talked about the different versions of Dara or Taj Mahal ka Tender he had seen performed by NSD over the years. There was a heated discussion on moral policing and banned plays, such as Vijay Tendulkar’s Sakharam Binder and Gidhade. Miranda,a solo in which Bharatanatyam met theatre, directed by Jatinder Verma and performed by Ankur Bahl, was looked forward to by most. A chat with a repertory member led me to a compilation of scripts based on Rabindranath Tagore’s stories at the institution’s bookshop. It remains a cherished copy.
Today, tickets to plays and festivals such as Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards, India Habitat Theatre Festival or Ranga Shankara Theatre Festival might be available online, but that feeling of camaraderie that binds theatre enthusiasts still exists. Recently, as I waited outside Siri Fort Auditorium for Naseeruddin Shah’s Einstein—the inaugural play of the sixth Delhi Theatre Festival—the queue was abuzz with discussions about past performances by Shah’s Motley Productions in the Capital, including Antigone, Old World and The Caine Mutiny Court -Martial. There was much talk about the latest events at Oddbird Theatre, a ware house-turned-performing arts venue in Delhi, and Prakash Raj’s incubation space, Nirdigantha, in Shettihalli, Karnataka, where plays like Project Darling by Sharanya Ramprakash have been developed.
There is something magical about a theatre experience, and the earlier the kids are introduced to it, the better. Let them be exposed to plays of varied themes and forms, and not just those that are labelled and marketed as “children’s theatre”. There has been considerable research by psychologists and educators on the role of theatre in children’s emotional and cognitive development, with such activities contributing to original thinking and creative problem solving. However, it is the intangible beauty of the experience that appeals to me—about being part of a meaningful community experience. Author Philip Pullman once wrote inThe Guardian:“The experience of being in the audience when a play or an opera is being performed is not simply passive. It's not like watching TV; it's not even like going to the cinema. Everyone in that big space is alive, and everyone is focused on one central activity. And everyone contributes. The actors and singers and musicians contribute their performance; the audience contribute their attention, their silence, their laughter, their applause, their respect. And they contribute their imagination, too.”
When we think of activities related to theatre, we always think of “performing”, of being on the stage in the spotlight. But there is great learning in being in the audience as well. You soak in collective energy, witness experimental approaches, and watch how quickly actors improvise on stage—transforming a stray stumble into an opportunity for expression. As a viewer, you transcend the barriers of language to connect with theatre practitioners and audience members on a humane level. As you watch people from the sound, light and costume departments work their magic together, you also realise the collaborative effort that goes into making a play. A 2018-performance ofKaruppuby Puducherry-based Indianostrum Theatre at the 13th edition of META being a case in point. Director Koumarane Valavane experimented with light arrangements to add another dimension to this performance about human relationship with darkness.
I recently accompanied a group of 13-year-olds to see Mehroon, a musical tale about longing, directed by Amitesh Grover and written by Sarah Mariam. They were amazed by how the six to seven actors seemed like a “cohesive whole” or a “single organism” in some of the scenes. “This is the kind of teamwork that we need—instead of one person trying to shine, everyone needs to come together to make a project a success,” remarked one young girl, who was working on a group science project for an exhibition. This might seem basic learning, but is an important one that will go a long way later in life as well. At a recent performance of Pankaj Kapur’s Dreamz, the same group couldn’t help but notice two characters on stage, whose role was simply to sit on a platform with a newspaper. But their stillness added to the tension of the scene. “I always wanted to play the protagonist. I even fought with my classmate for the main role. But I now see how every character matters,” said another 13-year-old.
My daughter and I watched Glitch in the Myth at Prithvi Theatre in Mumbai in early 2024 and then again at the Serendipity Arts Festival, Panjim, later that year. The solo performance by Anoushka Zaveri about sisterhood, told through the lens of a young and restless Sita, adapted to the two venues with variations. Viewing a performance repeatedly over time made us realise that each piece of text or drama is a pulsating flexible entity, which can be reconfigured to space and time. There are no fixed norms or boundaries anymore—plays can take place in parking lots and rooftops; ancient performing art forms can be resurrected to speak to contemporary times; clay and ceramics no longer need to act as props but can be one of the central characters in a performance like Lives of Clay by Vidya Thirunarayan or a shape-shifting table that acts as a raw giant member of an ensemble cast in Jyoti Dogra’s Mezok.
William Shakespeare’s Tempest can be reinterpreted in Bharatanatyam, as Ankur Bahl did in Miranda many years ago in Delhi to talk about gender and decolonisation. The feeling of being “in-between” can be treated in a tongue-in-cheek manner as evident in Faezeh Jalali’s Shikhandi (for a 15-plus audience). History can be retold in so many different ways, connecting the past with the present, as Einstein and Lillette Dubey’s award-winning play Sammy has shown us. You could be a sports fan and devise a play based on game strategies as Adhaar Khurana did in Tiki Taka. Plays like Dreamz bring to fore the power of writing in theatre, which speaks to the times. When Kapur says, “Mazhab agar benaam ho jaaye tho sukoon mile” (If faith/religion becomes anonymous, there will be peace), young people in the audience nod in agreement.
The possibilities of how you engage with theatre are endless. As Dogra said about Mezok: “You begin with nothing and stay in the nothingness till the end. That allows things to change.” That’s a great life lesson—you start with an empty space to tell a story and then return to emptiness after that. There is an ephemerality to the creation, much like life itself. Only this time, the stage allows you to tell and retell the story without the regrets of “what if”.
‘Raising Parents’ is a monthly column about art and culture ideas to inspire both children and adults.