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What does it mean to do theater?

“I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theater to be engaged“.
– Peter Brook (Legendary Theatre director of the acclaimed Mahabharata, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Marat/Sade).

An empty space. An actor, a lone actor just walking across an empty stage. One audience member. How simple. How profound. What is theater? It has meant different things at different points. It has performed different functions in societies at different points in time. In the Western world, it started with religious performances. Actually, a theatre was an extension of religion, spilling out of the church, the sacred stories of saints and miracles manifesting as dramas, as mystery and miracle play on make shift wagons, preaching the glories of religion and greatness of their saints. In India too natyashastra is considered the fifth of the Vedas, an art form which can borrow from different forms, painting, music and now even cinema, but exists to attain the high aim of conveying the rasa, to give aesthetic pleasure to the audiences and take them beyond the mundane goals of dharma, artha, kama and closer to moksha. While our classical performing traditions speak about the battles between Gods and Demons, between righteousness and evil, our folk performances have been always concerned with the mundane, topical and political.

Be it religious, secular, Shakespeare, Moliere, Brecht, a post-independence Indian drama, the theatre has always been a live encounter of one body of people with another. It is a meeting of two people inhabiting different spaces in the auditorium, the actors, and the audiences. One group of people use costumes, props, lights and sound to transform themselves into different characters in a different universe and that is only possible when the audience’s imagination allows them to follow the actors on this journey. Theater is created anew, afresh. Every moment, while intricately rehearsed, is brought to life anew and even while remaining the same, is different. The context is different. Each space is a new context. Each section of the audience that inhabits the theater is a new context. And even while the same play is performed on different days, there is something that keeps changing, moving, growing imperceptibly, responding to this new energy that inhabits the theater every evening.

As Shakespeare’s Hamlet would advise to a visiting band of actors:

“Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special overstep not the modesty of nature: for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ‘there, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”

Theatre has performed different functions down the ages. It has preached, enlightened, elevated, provoked, moved, revealed our prejudices, hypocrisies, confronted our sensibilities, and challenged all the assumptions we have been brought up with. It has questioned the artificial categories we tend to divide humanity under, and questioned all the holy cows that exist in society. One of my theater teachers made an interesting statement once, “Theatre exists in the space between what man is and what he can be. It is this ambivalence that makes for push and pulls within man that makes for a theatre. One day if man achieves the ideal, maybe theater would cease to exist.” I am not sure if the theater would ever cease to exist. Maybe it would find other stories to tell. As long as humanity continues to exist, the need to express, the need to tell a story of our shared humanity, the need to share the journey of our ever-expanding aspirations will never die. When the lights go down in the theatre, and the action on stage begins, it is a coming together of sorts; it is communion between the audience and the actors, where the two become a community, feeding off each other, justifying each other’s existence, giving each other meaning for that span of time and if the story has been powerfully embodied, maybe the audience walks back carrying a bit of that with them, they go back altered, discomfited, elevated, but never the same as they entered the theatre. Peter Brook called an empty auditorium a sad place. It indeed feels like one of the saddest places in the world where if one pays close attention, one can hear the echoes of the performance just finished.

The theater is a communal act, creating theater is a collaborative one, hence a political one, where different opinions merge, mix, collide, contrast, balance to create one coherent narrative and its ebbs and flows for the audience. The audience never sees the sewing or the tailoring, but it is witness to the final mosaic of the collective imagination of the ensemble that has crafted this together by sweating it out in a rehearsal room.

Theater can be polemical and is known to be one of the most fundamental tools of social and political change. The stage through its exploration of social concerns, economic inequities, patriarchal repression, gender biases and controversial issues often can usher in debate and dialogue on these issues. Examples of such cases in theater history are too many to be enumerated here. Henrik Ibsen, the father of modern drama, and Vijay Tendulkar, the post-Independence Indian playwright are a few examples who come to mind. Their plays like ‘A Doll’s House’, ‘Silence the court is in session’, ‘Sakharam Binder’ expose the marginalization and objectification of women, middle-class hypocrisies in a way that the society cannot take it. And so political goons attack shows, people walk out, cases are filed, demand for censorship is made; playwrights are assaulted, deemed immoral, unworthy, traitors…why? Because of theatre through its live manifestation of such issues and people, presenting all the issues and competing arguments in its complex way, unfolding live in front of the audience, lends a certain immediacy, urgency, and intensity and hits the audience in a way very few other media can boast of. And so the perennial suspicion of totalitarian governments. Theaters and theater artists are among the first ones to be attacked and sent to the gallows in times of political turbulence or authoritarian times. Safdar Hashmi of Jana Natya Manch, Delhi, and Meyerhold from Russia are a few names that immediately come to mind. Theater history is full of them. Theatre comprises of actors who act. To act implies action. To act means to do. Doing is moving. Doing is questioning, re-examining, challenging, reflecting, provoking, reimagining and changing. That is the realm of powerful theater, the realm of critical thinking, the realm of what it means to be human. To keep evolving according to the times and do our bit to shed light on the times we stay in, no matter how unpalatable they are and how high the risks are. And be ready to hang for it.

I would like to end this article with an excerpt from the great German playwright, theater director, and theorist Bertolt Brecht’s popular play ‘Mother Courage’, a powerful indictment of war and profiteering and the consequent moral corruptions and contradictions that follow:

“What they could use around here is a good war. What else can you expect with peace running wild all over the place? You know what the trouble with peace is? No organization. And when do you get organization? In a war. Peace is one big waste of equipment. Anything goes, no one gives a damn. See the way they eat? Cheese on pumpernickel, bacon on the cheese? Disgusting! How many horses have they got in this town? How many young men? Nobody knows! They haven’t bothered to count ’em! That’s peace for you! I’ve been in places where they haven’t had a war for seventy years and you know what? The people haven’t even been given names! They don’t know who they are! It takes a war to fix that. In a war, everyone registers, everyone’s name’s on a list. Their shoes are stacked, their corn’s in the bag, you count it all up — cattle, men, et cetera — and you take it away! That’s the story: no organization, no war!”