“I wonder if I knew what I was doing when I started off,” laughs acclaimed playwright, director and filmmaker Mahesh Dattani. He is in Chennai to direct Anupama Chandrasekhar’s, ‘Free Outgoing’ that will be performed by city-based theatre group Crea-Shakthi early next month.
Watch him weave purposefully across the sets, correcting actors, adjusting props, demanding perfection, and it is obvious that he knows exactly what he is doing. “It’s been a crazy journey and very unpredicted. It started off as a bunch of friends coming together, armed with youthful passion and little else. At that time, if someone had told me that I would be a professional playwright and director, and that I would get recognition, I would have laughed and said it was stupid.”
Born in Bangalore, Mahesh went on to work as a copywriter in an advertising firm for a while, and was then with the family business, before plunging full-time into theatre. “My interest in theatre was closeted for years. I saw a Gujarati play when I was very young and was drawn to the medium, but I never imagined I could be part of it.”
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He went on to join the Bangalore Little Theatre group, an amateur troupe that was “proud to be so”. “We were all people who had a day job but found time for theatre.” Strangely enough, the writing that has produced unforgettable plays, including ‘Dance Like a Man’, ‘Tara’, ‘Where did I Leave my Purdah’ and ‘Final Solutions’, among others, happened almost serendipitously. “A theatre festival was happening in the neighbourhood and we couldn’t find a play for it. I wanted to do something different and there was no one else to write what I wanted to do. So I went ahead and wrote my own play, ‘Where there is a Will’. I started writing pretty late, at 26, only out of necessity,” he says.
His plays, mostly set in urban, middle-class India, are soul-searching, dark narratives that manage to rip apart the superficial placidity of humdrum living, exposing a core that seethes with fractured emotions, tumultuous thoughts and unanswered questions.
“All artistes have a proclivity to a certain kind of subject or mood and I am definitely drawn towards drama and interpersonal and intrapersonal conflicts,” he says, adding that ‘Free Outgoing’ had all these elements, “It has this escalating tension that works very well,” he says. “And yes, it is so well-crafted.”
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Set in a gated community in Chennai, it is the story of a hard-working widow, Malini, and her two school-going children, Sharan and Deepa. She is especially proud of her daughter, Deepa, a bright child who does well academically. Then, a video of Deepa being intimate with a boy goes viral on the Internet. And Malini’s world comes crashing down.
“This play explores the dissonance between what we believe in and who we really are. Our human needs are very much in contradiction with the society we create. Although, in this case, it resonates with a Tamil-Brahmin middle class family, it could resonate with any family, any culture. Deepa never comes on stage; she stays behind a locked door all through the play. I see her as a metaphor for passion that has somehow transgressed social boundaries and, therefore, must be contained in a room. In a way, she represents everyone’s repressed sensuality,” he says.
Though the play has been staged abroad, this is its maiden production in India and Mahesh hopes to take it to other cities soon. Talking about his relationship with Chennai, Mahesh says, “This city is always about the people, the artistes I meet, the young people I work with. And of course, Mithran (the late Mithran Devanesan), who first brought me here. I love coming back to the city, the energy here, the way the traditional merges with the modern here...”
Talk about the oft-quoted adage of theatre being dead and Mahesh visibly bristles, “That question ought to be dead, not theatre. The fact is that theatre is around, despite more easily-accessible mediums of entertainment like television and cinema. People still take that effort to set aside time for theatre; so it means that there is something unique that it offers, which they cannot get anywhere else. It forces its audience to suspend disbelief, to be imaginative, to be an active spectator and that’s wonderful.”