Desi drama, subcontinental style

Gathering steam over the past few years have been a number of international theatre festivals organised in the various countries of the subcontinent, other than India. This week saw the inaugural edition of the week-long Bangladesh International Theatre Festival (BITF), held at Dhaka’s Shilpakala Academy coming to a close. Other festivals, held in Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka, have provenances that date back several years. While Indian productions have regularly been part of festival itineraries curated from responses to international calls for entries, their presence has been a trickle rather than the deluge one might expect.

Multicultural fare

The Indian highlight at BITF was its opening act. This was the acclaimed production of

Macbeth by Ratan Thiyam and his Chorus Repertory Theatre from Imphal. Although staged in Manipuri, its strong visual language, so distinctive of the visionary director’s style, likely ensured that no captioning was required. Now in its fifth year, this version places the Shakespearean play within the context of Meitei history even if the names of characters remain unchanged. On the second day of the festival, Thiyam conducted a well-received masterclass.

Macbeth was one of six international productions at BITF. Indian audiences might recall one entry —

Oh My Sweet Land — which was a rare international offering at the otherwise resolutely local Prithvi Theatre Festival, back in 2014. As multicultural as it gets, this is a French-UK co-production performed by Syrian-German actor Corinne Jaber and written and directed by Palestinian playwright Amir Nizar Zuabi. Jaber spends much of the play’s running time cooking the Kibbeh (traditional Syrian meatballs) in a Paris kitchen, while recounting the horrors of civil strife in Syria. The festival ended with a staging of

Light Puppet Show by the world-famous Nikolai Zykov Theatre of Russia.

Across the border

Earlier this year, similar international theatre festivals were organised in Karachi and Kathmandu. The Karachi-based National Academy of Performing Arts’ (NAPA) International Theatre Festival took place over a fortnight, from March 12. Perhaps predictably, there were no Indian entries. In its first-ever edition in 2014, Naseeruddin Shah’s

Ismat Apa ke Naam and Shantanu Bose’s

Raddi Bazaar were the two Indian productions staged. Both 2015 entries from India ran into visa issues, with the Ujjagar Dramatic Association’s

Kasomal Sapno missing its scheduled fixture, before being staged later.

Mahesh Bhatt’s Daddy , a stage adaptation of his 1989 television film, was also performed that year. It was a premium event with tickets priced at ₹2000, as against the standard festival rate of ₹400. Since then, efforts to bring over Indian productions (including two of Mohit Takalkar’s plays) have run into troubled waters, and there has been a drought similar to that experienced by Indian audiences vis-a-vis Pakistani plays. The cancellation of the Lahore-based Ajoka Theatre’s Kaun Hai Yeh Gustakh at the NSD’s Bharat Rang Mahotsav in 2013 comes to mind. This, after the troupe had already arrived in India. The cancellation was supposedly a response to armed skirmishes along the LOC in Kashmir.

Social transformation

In contrast, the Nepal International Theatre Festival (NITFest), held in February this year, included a whopping ten entries from India. All of which were a particularly diverse and accomplished set of plays, from Deepika Arwind’s I Am Not Here , to Nimmy Raphel’s Nidravathwam , to Head 2 Head , an inventive production inspired by Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana , by the Bengaluru-based Big Fat Company. The festival had a specific theme, ‘Theatre for Social Transformation: An Artistic Voyage’, and took place in five different venues in Kathmandu, including the Mandala Theatre, one of the flagship performance spaces behind the establishment of the festival in 2012 (although there have been international theatre festivals previously organised by other theatre organisations in Kathmandu, notably the Aarohan Gurukul). Taking a leaf from the NSD’s book, NITFest also organises parallel festivals in the Nepali cities of Biratnagar, Janakpur and Pokhara.

Coming up in August is the eight edition of the Colombo International Theatre Festival at the city’s century-old Elphinstone Theatre. Unlike the aforementioned festivals, this one doesn’t cover international travel, which makes it a showcase of mostly embassy-supported international works — the last edition’s lone Indian entry was Joy Maisnam’s performance of Nikolai Gogol’s The Diary of a Madman. What is ultimately important is that the festivals do provide avenues for cultural exchange in a part of the world that hasn’t always enjoyed long stretches of geopolitical stability, largely due to simmering bilateral tensions between India and Pakistan, even if, the natural cultural ties between immediate neighbours in the region have arguably remained strong.

The writer is a playwright and stage critic.