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If someone came up to me wanting to know what it takes to be a playwright, I am almost sure of finding myself with very little to say. Before anything else, I'll ask myself why it is that I write. Is it my love for theatre, my passion,the madness....? All but a farce.....because after so many years perhaps all theseaspects should have lost their shine. My reasons lie elsewhere. The truth is, writing a play or writing itself, for that matter, is seamlessly woven into the fabric of my being. There is never the need for any effort towards wanting to write.... I find myself thinking about writing almost all day...in gatherings...around friends....anywhere. Writing lingers in my thoughts like a lover. Kafka has eloquently put it: 'To write I need death like silence.' Now that brings me to my very next question, which is, how important is it for me to write? To answer this, I quote Rilke, who once said to a young poet, 'Ask yourself in the quietest hour of the night, is writing a primary necessity? The answer must be a 'yes' if you're living all alone and apart from yourself, can turn to no one.'
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When I wrote my first play, SHAKKAR KE PAANCH DAANE, I recall I was very disturbed for an entire year before the play. I was doing plays that I was not happy doing. I didn't find much inspiration either in the theatre that I was watching. I felt that I needed to do things differently. I had virtually locked myself into my room and was just reading and smoking. One day, my cleaning lady was going about her job, and I sat up, took pen and paper and started writing. My first line was : 'Main lad raha hoon...Aaj bhi lad raha hoon.' What followed was like a celebration. I finished the play that day itself. But I was missing the last poem that I wanted. Then I called Kumud (Mishra) and read the play to him. He said he would do it if I would finish it properly. Once Kumud told me that he would act, the production started taking shape in my head. We were nervous wrecks during the grand rehearsal and we did not receive good feedback from friends. The opening turned out to be a wonderful show.
But the journey of a writer, having lived through all this silence and solitude, begins not with his first play...but with his second. Because that is where, comes in the dilution of the expectations of his audience. The juncture where he finds himself having to walk the line between what it is that he wants to write vis-à-vis what he should. It would have been very easy perhaps for me to write a monologue again after SHAKKAR...but I do not want to repeat myself. Over the years, I have written about different subjects. I have found inspiration from my favourite writers such as Nirmal Verma, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre and Orhan Pamuk.
There isn't a fixed time in which I complete the play I have started on. ILHAM, which was produced in 2008 took me two and a half years. I had to be very careful since the play draws on a long line of famous philosophers. I had to be careful because every sentence in a philosophical argument can open a new chapter. In my writing I have followed that if I am disturbed with something, I shall say it. I do not bother about structure. I am not interested in structured plays. The thrill for me is how the words take on their own form as the play progresses.
In my earlierplays, the writer in me used to dominate. But after RED SPARROW (2010), I started enjoying direction. LAAL PENCIL (2012), my latest play, emerged out of my residency in a small town in South Korea. It's unlike anything I have done before. I don't plan my writing. My pages are always ready, my pen is always there. Also when I am writing a play, I am always writing something else- like a short story. It's like having an extramarital affair and I know that my play will beckon me again.
I play badminton. Badminton provides me relief. As a writer you need to do something physical. I play twice or thrice a week. I used to be a good swimmer too. Once I held the third position at the all India university level. In my limited experience, I have seen that a writer who tends to create anything with his audience in mind is more often lost. He ends up in a space where whatever he churns out is projected towards the outward rather than the inward.
The real graph or the complete circle of the life of a writer comes alive only when he can't and doesn't repeat his work, irrespective of the consequences. And in that circle what matters most is how the writer remains entertained and how elements of his work can constantly surprise him. I direct my plays. It's in the process of the production that I can keep challenging myself. For my audience, my words may be new, but for me I have heard them enough and need to move on.
Does a play change the world, a society, a country? No. It's a momentary form of art that caters to a niche audience, lasting for not more than a couple of hours. It's like life itself, where what you experience for that time in that space, is nothing more than a memory right after it is lived. Which is what brings so much beauty to theatre and to the eyes that witness it. 'Literature doesn't give one water;all it gives is a realisaion of an unquenchable thirst. When in a dream you drink water, on waking you realise how thirsty you actually were.' I find Nirmal Verma's words to beautifully sum up the taste of living around theatre. It is a dream that I never want to wake up from.
*Manav Kaul is a contemporary Hindi playwright-director. Since his SHAKKAR KE PAANCH DAANE in 2004, Manav has come to be regarded as one of the few playwrights in Hindi theatre with a distinct voice and sensibility of their own. Under the banner of his theatre company, Aranya, Manav has written, directed and produced various plays like PEELE SCOOTERWALA AADMI, BALI AUR SHAMBHU, PARK, and others. Before venturing out on his own, Manav worked as an actor with Satyadev Dubey, Sunil Shanbag and others.
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