Summertime in Mumbai is synonymous with theatre for children. Literally. Sanjna Kapoor is responsible for spearheading ‘Summertime at Prithvi’ as a season for children, and popularising it. A huge draw is the plethora of workshops, where parents readily send their children to keep them occupied for a part of the holidays. But the bigger achievement, I feel, is three months of regular plays for children.
Of late, most of the plays I have produced go out there with the “strictly for adults” disclaimer. Our popular plays tend to be written in contemporary voices, which in turn tend to be profane. But what is interesting is that we really built the company on plays for children, and have produced eight of those.
I remember rehearsing for an adult play back in 2007, which dealt with infidelity, marital discord, domestic violence, and an unsolved murder. We were at Prithvi House, which offers a rehearsal space right across the theatre, and around 10:30 a.m., on our chai break, I saw a serpentine queue comprised of families, waiting for entry. My interest was piqued.
Opportunities galore
This was my first encounter with the phenomenon that was ‘Summertime’. The producer in me saw an opportunity to get assured dates and a large turnout. The director in me saw an opportunity to do something for a completely new audience. But I needed to understand this better.
I decided to catch up with the existing plays for children, and I was mostly disappointed. Besides being for children, the plays I saw also seemed childish. Much later, Kapoor explained to me what it really was. The actors were “talking down” to the children. And hence underestimating their intelligence. Soon after, I watched a play called Dhoni Dho Daalta Hai by Makrand Deshpande, about a cricket loving dhobi, which I enjoyed thoroughly, as did others in the audience. This gave me hope. I took inspiration from the animated films of DreamWorks and Pixar, which were equally enjoyed by adults and children. And the search for the right play began.
What I wanted was content with Western sensibility and an Indian context. After much reading, the answer was quite an obvious one: Ruskin Bond. Engaging with him subsequently, and maintaining a relationship over 10 years, certainly qualifies as one of the more rewarding experiences of my life.
To cut a long story short, we actually created a trilogy of shows based on his life and stories, which have cumulatively performed over a 100 shows across more than 20 cities. A vast school circuit which we didn’t know existed suddenly welcomed us. And a lesser known group from Mumbai was performing in not just the metros, but in hill stations and gurukuls. The biggest triumph, however, remains that a lot of children bought their first Ruskin Bond book after watching one of these shows.
The Hindi Wizard
In these past 10 years, while we regularly produced plays for children—a successful Hindi version of The Wizard of Oz , stage adaptations of Tintin , Peter Pan , and a bunch of novels, including one by Enid Blyton—we also saw an advent in the number of groups performing plays for children. NCPA came up with their Summer Fiesta, Kapoor continued exposing more schools to theatre via her organization Junoon, and India had its first Disney musical, among other developments.
Part of this evolution can be attributed to people pushing the envelope with content and not “talking down”. Naseeruddin Shah’s group Motley has consciously been bringing the work of the likes of George Bernard Shaw and Krishan Chandar to kids, while auteurs like Yuki Ellias have been exposing them to more abstract forms of theatre. Shaili Sathyu’s Gillo has been very enterprising, and their plays are constantly touring smaller towns. This is upping the ante. People have started investing in live music, choreography, better production design, and stagecraft, in general.
Children are now exposed to tons of global (and world class) content on a daily basis. Their expectations from theatre targeted at them are now higher, and their attention spans are lower. From the outside it may seem that children are an easy-to-please audience. While not completely untrue, they’re also equally easy to lose. And as a result, we theatre creators need to innovate, evolve, and basically, improve.
On the downside though is sustenance. It’s wonderful to open a play and run it during vacations, but afterwards, keeping it running isn’t always easy. A lot of productions for children tend to have large casts and formidable running costs. The first two parts of our Bond trilogy had a dozen people who doubled up as required. But I got ambitious and in the third and final chapter, we have twice as many people, plus song and dance. The key is to find a balance. A perfect mix of style and substance, and of pizzazz and practicality.
As our population increases on a daily basis, one of the few good outcomes is that this young audience is growing. In the long run, if you win them over early in life, you’ve got a committed theatre enthusiast in the making, which helps the art form in the larger picture. “Catch them young,” as they say. Or “I believe the children are our future,” as Whitney Houston once said.
