Something fresh and bold was visible in NSD's just-concluded graduate show this year.
The Graduate Show 2009: a festival of plays directed by the final year students of the National School Drama, featuring five plays, concludes as you read this column. When I was a student at the School, such a festival had been organised, and it was such an exciting and exhilarating experience to have the opportunity to present our work to the critics and the general public. The fear of being judged by people who did not know you also led to extreme nervousness, which one discovered later would be a constant, irrespective of seniority or long experience. This year a similar festival has been organised after a long gap, and it is a welcome addition to the festivals that the NSD presents, because it gives a picture not only of what the students have learnt, but also of the direction each one might take as also the creative process of the younger generation of theatre actors and directors.
Every play in the festival had the very individual signature of its young director, in terms of reflecting his/her personal concerns, background and experience. So there was Andha Yug, the classic about the last days of the Mahabharat war, seen from the perspective of the Kauravs who feel extremely wronged by Krishna. This particular production was an attempt to look at terrorist violence today as the result of injustices of the state, but in a theatrical language that links this very classical play to the sensibility of the younger generation of today. The classical Greek tragedy Trojan Women was delicately crafted into a production that became a comment on the plight of Dalits, helpless, subjugated and exploited. One of the plays, Rang Abhang, the result of some field research, was an exploration of the reasons and impact of the disappearance of the prompter from the stage, an entity both crucial and marginal to the performance at the same time. Two of the productions were more message-oriented: When I Was a Child, which dealt with the ills of the education system, and The Land Weaver, about the insensitivity of the state vis-a-vis the farmer suicides.
The theatrical language of each of these productions once again reflected both the training at NSD and their own cultural context, apart from a youthful energy and imagination that made the productions extremely fresh and contemporary . Almost all the productions were a result of intense ensemble work where the actors played an equally important role in evolving the style of the plays as the directors. And since these students come from diverse cultural and social backgrounds, what we saw on stage was a delightful and complex collage of varied body languages, images, sound patterns and emotional responses, woven together by content and an overall design. The actors were equally at ease with grand classical characters as in a kinky rock chorus; they brought equal energy to vigorous stylised movement as to a poised and intense silent moment. The design of these productions showed tremendous innovativeness in their use of space, materials and lights, helping to layer the meaning of the texts they had chosen.
On the whole, there was something fresh and bold about the theatrical language of each of these productions because the young directors and performers had taken the kind of risks that many of us would be scared to take. It was gratifying that the performances ran to packed houses and were appreciated by the audiences, which put paid to the viewpoint that abstract and stylised theatre is beyond the reach of the common man. All power to the young!
