Last week, as part of a theatre appreciation class I take at the Drama School, Mumbai, I introduced my students to a form of documentary theatre. Verbatim theatre is the word-for-word representation of actual testimonials. The school is housed at the fifth floor of the Mumbai Marathi Sahitya Sangh in Charni Road, and sandwiched between a graveyard and the auditorium is a small alley bustling with activity. The brief was for each student to interview a person who was part of the street’s economy: tea-sellers, shop owners, roadside vendors. The sessions were short, lasting roughly 15 minutes each. Later, back in the classroom, they would sit in a circle, and read out the unexpurgated passages.
The stories that emerged were piquant and compelling. These were tales of migrants who came from far-flung places: Kanpur, Hazaribagh, and that village from Gangs of Wasseypur . Clearly, the mines in Dhanbad have conceded precious ground to a home-grown spaghetti western. A young man, practically still a boy, didn’t remember his birthday because ‘they don’t celebrate such things’, a septuagenarian talked of how he survived on just one meal a day for 32 years. Several were business owners who were their own masters even if they still had to deal with ‘ bhaigiri , dadagiri , the police and the BMC’. For one man, selling newspapers was a noble profession because he was distributing knowledge after all. There was nostalgia for the past, like when Kalewadi (in Charni Road) was much less crowded and the traffic, non-existent.
Women were not interviewed, yet attitudes towards them was a feature of many a conversation, perhaps due to the leading questions that may have been asked. There was a begrudging nod at progressive notions: the forthright women they saw on stage were admired, and working women in the city acknowledged as a necessity of the times, yet charity didn’t quite begin at home, and the younger lot (of interviewees) had retiring housewives tucked away in villages. Yet, there were others who were proud of their educated daughters. There was a sense of struggle, a constant jousting with situations, but it was laced with the optimism and stoicism of the human spirit.
The demeanour of presentation added nuances and maybe a subtle interpretative quality, one degree removed from a real person’s real life. Some students ‘acted’, replete with tics and tongues, others were deadpan emissaries of rare depositions. It was a given that some ideas would be lost in translation, not just of language, but of subtext. In the end though, it was clear that there is an unmistakable authenticity to words faithfully reproduced and a clarity of character that sometimes passes by more fictionalised portrayals. This is a quality that one can do well to preserve.
There are aesthetics to verbatim theatre and a potential to transform that would be revealed better by more grounded exercises. It is regarded as a tool for social and political change, because it provides personal perspectives that are usually pushed underground. The Laramie Project was a play (and later a film) based on real-life testimonies of locals of a town grappling with the homophobic murder of one of their own, Matthew Shepherd. It was this kind of public introspection that led to the changing of hate crime legislation in the U.S.
For now, this taster session still managed to cut a swathe across the embedded psyche of a street full of bijou dreams and epic lives. Dheer Hira, an actor from the school’s previous batch, who participated in the exercise, had been close to some of the subjects. He had practically lived on the same street for a whole year during the course. Yet, despite his back-slapping familiarity with them, their disarming personal stories (whatever could be collated in just 15 minutes) still took him by surprise.
In Indian theatre, verbatim techniques are not as widespread as they could be. Ramu Ramanathan’s Postcards from Bardoli appeared to have verbatim elements, almost as if passages from newspaper articles had been inserted into the text, as representative of a dysfunctional zeitgeist. The narrative itself is fictionalised. Ranvir Shorey’s work in The Blue Mug , steeped in realism and a colloquial exactness, could almost pass off as a verbatim piece if it wasn’t for the carefully calibrated humour. His character of a middle-aged man who has no memory beyond his early youth was based on an actual psychiatric case study.
More recently, as part of the Summertime season at Prithvi Theatre, Reshma Shetty performed House of Shops with a scratch team consisting of both actors and non-actors. Like the gulli in Charni Road that served as the subject of our class exercise, this play was an ode to the denizens of Bandra’s Bazaar Road, a neighbourhood in perennial transition, where cultures mix awkwardly and an appetite for life can be seen everywhere. Shetty’s play is a mix of several dramatic set-pieces, including puppetry and shadow theatre, but there are frequent snippets of actual speech apprehended from real-life conversations. Certainly, relaying a person’s thoughts and feelings ‘in their own words’ sometimes touches a raw nerve that bring us closer to ourselves and the world we live in.
The writer is a playwright and stage critic
