Infrastructure, support need of the hour for theatres: Shernaz

Theatre as an art form is attracting the young generation more now than before but actress Shernaz Patel says one can't survive doing just theatre.
Patel, founder-partner of Rage Productions, which has been working on a project "Writers' Bloc" - a unique skills development programme in association with British Council and Royal Court Theatre London for the last 15 years, has trained over 50 young India playwrights and premiered 41 plays.
"Infrastructurally, we are still where we were since theatre has not got more funding, not enough corporate encouragement, lack of space and other problems that do not seem to be addressed," Patel said yesterday during her visit in the city to oversee staged readings of plays from the Writers' Block project.

The British Council is scheduled to present staged readings of English Play 'Djinns of Eidgah' by Abhishek Majumdar and 'Hard Places' by Farhad Sorabjee, both Writers' Block Alumni on Friday and Saturday respectively.
According to Patel, for the last 15 years "Writers' Bloc has championed the burning need for new stories and new plays written by our own young playwrights in their words, in their language on stories about the India we live in today. We have been lucky that British Council and Royal Court Theatre London has been partnering us through all these years."
She said 15 years ago there was a strong need for encouraging new writing in terms of theatre.

"We had been feeling this for a long time because so many projects happened for other forms of writing but not that much for writing for theatre."
She said, the British Council Library (BCL) head, 15 years ago in Mumbai, Paul Smith who loved theatre had told us about Royal Court Theatre London, the home of playwriting and asked us to meet them and since then the journey started.