What Does The Future Hold For Theatre

First Published in the Free Press Journal on 13 July 2022 It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

Charles Dickens’ opening lines of The Tale of Two Cities (set just before the French

Revolution) could easily be applied to the city’s theatre landscape in the month of

March 2020.

At the beginning of the month, never had there been more performers, venues,

performances, groups, and even newly written texts present than at any point in our

history. Across languages, genres, topics. The diversity on offer was mindboggling.

There were lavish spectacles like Alladin and Mughal-e-Azam and independent off beat

experiments like The Dark Room or Sounding Vanya. Performances were happening in

every little nook and corner of the city, from restaurants like The Bombay Canteen to

co-working spaces like Harkat & WeWorks to new exclusive theatre venues like Veda

Factory and G5A. But by the end of the month, all of that came to a screeching halt.

The very act of performing for a live audience became ‘dangerous’.

The theatre fraternity went through a crisis like no other. Many gave it up and moved

to other professions that could sustain them more securely. Many actors left the

expensive city and moved back to more affordable locations of their hometowns. And

many questioned will theatre survive? Will audiences be back?

But, the theatre, is nothing if not resilient, and two years later, they are all back – the

plays, the performers and the audiences. While not yet in the same numbers as before,

there is a slow momentum building that theatre might just recover those glory days of

the 2010s.

However, the Pandemic has had a huge economic impact on the theatre industry,

particularly the independent enterprises. Few venues like Bandra’s lovely Cuckoo Club,

and Aaram Nagar’s Over Act have had to close. Most companies have eaten into their

‘next production nest-egg’ simply to survive. So, the new productions they are planning

are smaller and more modest in their vision. The larger players who were funding the

lavish spectacles are now taking a slightly more circumspect view of things.

But what does this all mean for the years to come?

Well, artistically, it is likely to be a very fertile time. As artists process the two years

of the pandemic, I expect numerous interesting stories and productions to be created.

Early during Lockdown there was a meme that went around saying that Shakespeare

wrote four of his strongest plays during the London plague. Yet, none of those plays

actually mention that particular time, but when Mercutio curses Romeo with “A plague

on both your houses!”, you can imagine the impact of that statement on the Elizabethan

audience. I think the new plays will have a similar significance. Who we are has changed

drastically in the last two years, and the best new plays will not be ones that are

overtly about the Pandemic, but the ones where the experience of two years has

seeped into the writing.

The Lockdowns also exposed us to technologies that were otherwise unavailable. This

was most apparent in how some of the younger groups took to adapting performances to

the live online medium using software like OBS and Vmix, with almost professional

precision. These technologies are bound to find their way onto the stage, since for the

first time, live camera work and projections are affordable.

Also, the economic crunch will require theatre groups to find new forms of telling their

stories. I don’t know what they are, but I can’t wait to sample them.

The last two years have also coincided with a severe clampdown on freedoms –

particularly those of expression, artistic or otherwise. Some of the most fertile eras in

history have been when artists have been given less space to speak freely; be it the

anti-establishment plays during the Independence movement, or the formation of

IPTA, or Safdar Hashmi’s work against exploitative factory owners, or even the great

Irish playwrights during their Occupation. Would Arturo Ui have been written without

Hitler? Would Brechtian theatre ever have existed without Fascism? The current

clampdown on activists and thinkers mirrors so many Central American countries of the

1970s and 80s and is likely to spawn an entire generation of ‘revolutionary’ theatre. At

least that’s the hope anyway.

But most importantly, the Pandemic, inadvertently, has also brought into sharp focus

just how important the theatre is - especially as a tool of healing. Going forward it has

a HUGE role to play in human beings trusting one another. This is because it is one of

the few experiences in the world where we sit with a bunch of strangers and look at

another human being in the flesh with curiosity and generosity. Quasar Thakore Padamsee is a Bombay-based theatre-holic. He works primarily as a theatre-director for arts management company QTP, who also manage the youth theatre community, Thespo.