Bring on the audience

Theatre weaves magic, they say. A large part of the magic lies in the way a production is able to draw the audience into a creative dialogue with the performers.

I saw one such magical tapestry last week in the production of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, by students of the National School of Drama under the direction of a young director, Abhilash Pillai.

Given the grand scale of the novel, one would have thought that any attempt to bring it on stage was bound to be a let-down. But here was a band of energetic youngsters who transformed the entire auditorium into a colourful performance space where Rushdie's India pulsated with life.

The audience was drawn into the magical world of Saleem Sinai, the protagonist of the novel/play, with conjurers, street performers, processions weaving in and out of the auditorium, with the rich multimedia visuals of the past and present projected on the flying carpet created on stage, and with endearing characters fumbling through life in the tumultuous world that was India around independence.

Theatre is a live art and its strength is in the dynamic relationship between the performers and the audience while the performance is on. There are several ways in which this relationship works.

I remember seeing a children's play by the group Umang several years back. I was seated in the audience along with a child audience of about 900. The children were in the 5-9 age group. In the play, which was centred around a king's dream, the lights dimmed as the king fell asleep on his bed.

As the lights started coming up, the audience seemed suddenly galvanised and I was distracted by a sudden whispering all over the auditorium "" "Sun is rising, sun is rising." I looked at the stage where a child hiding behind the bed was slowly raising an orange cardboard cut out stuck on a stick.

A very familiar device, this. But the young audience was excited at probably the recognition of this symbol. And at this moment they became a part of the performance in a very special and creative way.

The eminent Bengali playwright/director Badal Sircar insists on actors directly confronting the audience with uncomfortable social, political questions. The performers often also insist that you join them in the action on stage.

This is a very interesting ploy to change a passive viewer into an active participant and demands greater involvement and commitment from the audience. While many members of the audience see in this a new power, there are many who also resent this encroachment into their space.

This privacy has to be respected. But from the point of view of the practitioner, he is only furthering the function of theatre, that of creating awareness and not allowing you to take the performance as just one big tamasha.

And wouldn't you love to see a play where at the end of a performance you are given delicious pakoras with chatpati chatni?

I went to one such play called Kitchen Katha which was a virtual feast for the senses, what with vegetables all over the stage being cooked in large vessels even as the story of the play moved forward.

The cooking sent up huge whiffs of delectable smells as also well orchestrated sounds of chopping and frying etc. The biggest surprise came when the actors, at the end of the play, came distributing the pakoras to the audience.

These were very special pakoras indeed, as they were being cooked along with the story, their taste suggesting the bitter-sweet experience of the protagonist. One carried that taste home and it lingered on for long.

Now tell me, where else is the audience so special to the performance?