Rudimentary, Momentary, Fragmentary: The year-end student presentations at the Drama School, Mumbai

Last weekend, on Saturday, 20th June 2015, a small group of audience members turned up to support the year-end presentations by the 2014-15 batch of students at the Drama School, Mumbai (DSM) at the Marathi Sahitya Sangh, braving the more than usual heavy showers that crippled the city. The batch had completed its One Year Certificate Course in Acting and Theatre. The evening was planned in a room fitted with makeshift lights. The bare minimal black curtain as backdrop acted simultaneously as a cover for the ''backstage'' area. Indian theatre is known to function in circumstances like these that get sometimes even worse.

There is a lot to be said about the ingenuity of Indian theatre practitioners who have internalised the unique Indian concept of jugaad like the rest of their fellow country men and women. They superbly make do with what is available to them, and are always ready for surprises (rarely, pleasant ones) that could occur on the very day of the show. Yet in this ''Indian'' scheme of things, there are Indian theatre practitioners whose professionalism and a developed sense of aesthetics surpasses what is available to them, both in terms of resources and space. These are rare practitioners though. Most of the time we seem to have made an unnatural art out of this so-called poverty of logistics in Indian theatre. The truth is indeed something else and in a longer line of inquiry, unpalatable.

In normal circumstances, I might not have got reflective about this familiar landscape but here the landscape, or the ecosystem, is not just the immediate space of performance, but a regimented, structured course bringing to the fore, young people who want to go out and make a career in theatre, television and film. They are brave young people wanting to take on the challenges of a difficult career but are they really equipped? They seem to have the attitude; they are smarter with the technology at their disposal but does this make them actually creative? They are idealistic but what are their ideals exactly in a cocooned environment in which they are way more privileged than their parents or grandparents have ever been?

That evening spent in their company was revealing vis-a-vis some of these niggling questions. The torpor in which a lot of urban Indian theatre exists loomed large. But it is not just the lassitude that is worrisome. What is more dangerous is that this kind of urban theatre, usually in English and sometimes in Hindi, is getting increasingly irrelevant and meaningless - its audience restricted to a clique, a coterie in which self-fulfillment and glorification outrun substance.

I saw seven 'original' pieces created by the students and mentored by some of the well-known theatre names in Mumbai ranging from the older generation of Sunil Shanbag and Mahesh Dattani to younger theatre people - among them, Puja Sarup, Yuki Ellias and Faezeh Jalali. With two exceptions - TRUDY, written by Jane Wagner and SHOES, written by Abhinav Grover, inspired in its turn by Abhishek Majumdar's play AN ARRANGEMENT OF SHOES, the rest of the writing is not even worth a mention, and neither was it remotely remarkable in terms of the staging. Ironically, in spite of some of the contemporary themes such as gadget addiction in SEARCH (GOOGLE IT), the style was jaded and hackneyed.

A surprise, passionate moment of paint being flung on a canvas in WHO YOU'RE NOT is wasted in the meaningless abstraction of the piece. One way to describe some of the flotsam of theatre that evening is abstraction, but this abstraction was spineless and cut off from any provocation. SILENCE PLEASE! was pathetic instead of evoking any pathos for the boy who mourned his mother. The text was central to each of these short acts that lasted between 10 and 15 minutes but most of them collapsed precisely because of the rudimentary, momentary and the fragmentary nature of their plots and characters. Whoever can create meaningful, short pieces of theatre lasting 10 or 20 minutes has to be a genius, or at the least, very very good. Otherwise you can forever buy into the 'Short +Sweet' phenomenon and its likes and find gratification in them for everything but the theatre.

I could go on but it's pointless to go on in this vein - the fault does not lie with the young students.

Nobody told them this is bad stuff.

Nobody whacked them saying you can't put this up.

To be fair, the DSM is a young school that is going through a learning curve. To its credit, it has made positive inroads such as encouraging its students to think laterally about theatre in India, beyond region and language. Its faculty has comprised practitioners across the spectrum of theatre in the country. It has involved its students to engage with these practitioners through talks, discussions and relevant projects. The school's team is well-meaning. They are a vibrant, earnest lot, ready to engage and learn. Their full-fledged student production of THE DRAGON, early this year, directed by Tushar Pandey, and performed by the same group of students was a far more sturdy exercise in terms of intent, performance and stagecraft. The production managed to be resonant about the subversiveness of power, rule and governance underlying the fairy-tale like narrative of Evgeny Shvart's play, even as it lacked finesse and a professional construct, which by the way, has to be sacrosanct for student productions too.

DSM at least has the desire to do things right. The same cannot always be said about some of the more established and well-known centres of institutionalized theatre training in India whose structural imbalances and fault lines run deeper and which are caught up in bureaucracy, petty politics and myopic regionalism. In the larger context of all theatre training, especially given the present-day proliferation of theatre workshops and programmes in India, tougher questions need to be posed about practices and outcomes. Acting maybe the buzzword but it's not for everybody. Neither is writing. But one of the wonders of theatre is precisely that it is not limiting to any one medium.

Functionality must trump formality.

It's important to get it right, first.

Students cannot escape their responsibility either - they are in for a greater test of their ambitions and credibility in a neoliberal Indian state caught up in the throes of capitalism and commoditisation. Will they be mediocre and casual? Or will they be daring and innovative? Will they be co-opted by the system or will they ask the difficult and the uncomfortable questions in their theatre?

In DSM's own quest, and for its own sake, concentrated efforts must be channelised towards concrete outcomes; a serious focus on professionalism in all aspects is especially required - tardiness just won't do. Finally, time, experience and humility.

Then it will indeed be opening night.

I for one await it and wish the school and its students well.

*Deepa Punjani is the Editor of this website.