Marathi playwright Achyut Vaze may not have received the kind of Pan Indian recognition that his fellow playwrights Satish Alekar and Mahesh Elkunchwar have but those who have read and seen his work will well regard his distinct contribution to the Marathi avant-garde theatre. In this freewheeling conversation, Achyut Vaze speaks to Arun Naik and Vijay Kenkre about his earlier plays, about his arguments with Satyadev Dubey, of his critically acclaimed plays such as BHOPLYA: CHAL RE BHOPHLYA TUNUK TUNUK and other reminiscences. Interviews of this kind invariably evoke temporal and spatial references of an earlier time. Achyut Vaze's plays like SOFA CUM-BED coincided with the beginnings of the Chhabildas theatre space whereas Arun Naik and Vijay Kenkre recall a performance of BHOPLYA on the terrace of Sahitya Sahwas in Bandra East.
By Arun Naik and Vijay Kenkre
You were acclaimed in the 1970s and 80s as one of the three main playwrights in the Marathi parallel theatre along with Mahesh Elkunchwar and Satish Alekar. So how did it all begin?
Well, it began with a children's play, when I was in school. It was always about doing a play. It was never about writing a play. But one could not easily find a play to do. So the best option was to write one yourself. Writing a play was of secondary importance at the time and there were no good plays then. And more so, there were no children's plays. Sudha Karmarkar (the pioneer in the Marathi children's theatre movement, and Vijay Kenkre's aunt) was our model in those days.
So I started writing. My first play was inspired by an Enid Blyton story and was called HARAVALA HAAR RAJKANYECHA. It was a full-length play with three acts. We felt that a play needed that span. But we had no money to stage the play. We did not want to stage it in a school hall. We wanted to do it in a regular theatre. But children's plays were performed in school. So we did it in many schools as possible and we took money for the shows. That was probably the most successful part of my theatre career. Instead of losing money, we were earning a little from this activity!
The first adult play we did was EK HOTA MADHUKAR. We had only one show at the Marathi Sahitya Sangh. We did not have money for the rent. I was in college in Delhi and I gave a cheque from the Delhi branch of my bank. There was no balance in my account. We canvassed and sold tickets. I collected the cash and deposited it in my Delhi bank and got the cheque honoured. The great Balgandharva passed away on the day we had the show. Nana Oak (an elderly actor) who was acting in our play said that we should cancel the show.
That was in 1966 or 1967...
Yes. We had collected money for this show. We went to Tatya Amonkar (Vijay Kenkre's grandfather) and requested him. He gave us the permission. We had the show in the afternoon. So he allowed us to have the show, saying that he would cancel the night show as a mark of respect to Balgandharva.
What was the play about?
There is this young boy called Madhukar. The play was about how Madhukar discovers himself. He lives a simultaneous triple life--Madhya, Madhukar and Madhukarrao. They exist together despite belonging to three different age groups. The other supporting characters interact with all three characters. That was the fun bit in the play.
I think there was some influence of V. Shantaram. We had inserted a dance called 'Unmesh'. So we needed a Sandhya (the actress). We had a dancer and then we named our group as Unmesh--which means inspiration to do something. (Unmesh was a prominent theatre group headed by Achyut Vaze, which became famous because it held annual inter-collegiate one-act competitions) We had a character named kal (time). Nana Oak had done that role. The three Madhukars would connect with this Kal simultaneously. I wrote what I felt at that time. Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni (the well-known critic) said that this was a very contrived story to make the play seem experimental. We had no idea what experimental theatre was. We wanted to do a play, so we did it. And as no play was available I had written a new one! Jayram Hardikar played Madhukar.
Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni wrote a lengthy critical review. We went and met him, and quarrelled with him. We told him that he should in fact encourage us. Then my second play was SHADJA. Even SHADJA was criticised a lot. They called it 'Ardhavat, achrat Shadja'. But Madhav Manohar (another senior critic) had liked it. Some other critics had also praised it. Someone also called it a 'dramatic poem'. It was about how a person is made a power-monger, and about how he has no choice. This play was directed by Dilip Kolhatkar and Jayram Hardikar had played the lead again.
Who had directed the first play?
I did. And so it had failed. I never wanted to be a director. I did direct many plays, but by compulsion. I consider myself a writer only. I am also a producer. I am interested in doing plays. Direction is a technical field. It is not my field. But I differed with Dilip's version. There were only four characters. The power-monger himself, his companion played by Subodh Gadgil, his secretary Chitra Palekar, and her husband which Amol Palekar later played. In addition to these four original characters, Dilip had introduced a blind woman. Her only business was to laugh. Only her face was seen: she was made up that way. And she would merely laugh. I had not liked the idea at all. But he had his own reason: he said he used the technique to highlight some important points in the play.
So you had founded Unmesh then?
Unmesh was founded when EK HOTA MADHUKAR was done. Even Dilip Kolhatkar was new then.
The students of the Drama Department at Mumbai University did a classroom production of SHADJA last year. It was a very simple production. And they had not imposed anything on it. It was a good performance. With a play like SAJDA, a director is compelled to force something into it. There is a kind of natural prompting. But these students did not do anything of the sort, and so the play worked very well.
The play was a bit controversial then. A man and a woman are dependent on the main character who is a male himself. Some felt that there could be a homosexual relationship between the main character and the other male. It was very symbolic of course, but nothing definite. After a certain level of intimacy the possibility of such a relationship is naturally suggested, though it may not be intentional. But some critics developed this idea. Like Lalita Bapat. 'Homosexuality shown on stage' was the headline of her review.
The Censor Board then provoked controversies of plays by Khanolkar and Tendulkar. Your plays were also subject to this. There used to be debates about what constituted pornography and what did not. It was even so with the novels of writers like Bhau Padhye.
It was a big issue then. Yes, that's true. The interesting thing was that they would censor the script, not the performance. This was very funny. You could do what you liked in the performance.
That is so even today.
In SOFA-CUM-BED they had objected to the stage directions given in the brackets.
They first pass your script. But any member of their Board can see any performance and then take objections.
Basically it is like that, but it does not happen that way. In SOFA-CUM-BED I had written 'sounds signifying intercourse' in brackets. I had written it only for the director. They objected to it and cut it. The director ultimately decides. So this censorship is meaningless. We had great fun doing SHADJA though. The rehearsals were great fun. By then the entire group was intoxicated with the play. We did about 25 shows. We did shows in Tejpal auditorium. In those days Tejpal was quite cheap.
Then we did SOFA-CUM-BED. I wrote that play and there was a different kind of controversy. First Satydev Dubey did the play. Dilip Kolhatkar had inserted an additional character. Dubey split one character into three characters. And he did the play that way. I used to call it an 'innocent' play. The innocence was the core of the play. This chap falls in love with a girl with whom he has not yet spoken but he almost has a love affair with her. The girl doesn't even know that this chap exists. The play was on a sublime level. Dubey split the chap into three characters and very naively presented a story unfolding everything. There was no point in having one chap with a poetic disposition, then another rather aggressive. That is what I felt. We would continuously discuss the play. I let him do it. The title was DHADSI DHONDUCHYA DHANDALI then. The original name was SOFA-CUM-BED, ARTHAT DHAMAL DHONDUCHYA DHANDALI. He used the latter half of the title and did about 15 shows. We kept arguing that this was not proper.
Who were the actors?
That was another problem. The female Anamika is supposed to be very beautiful. This character was miscast by Dubey. Theatre is a visual medium. If you disturb the basics you miss the poetry. The actress may be otherwise great. Age and looks are however important. The girl is in the first year in college. She is 16 or 17 and she is beautiful. Then there is this woman who introduces the boy to sex. She works in an advertising agency. She is much older than him. That was played by Sunila Pradhan. The girl has an aunt. That was played by Rekha Sabnis.
Then we had a party where all theatre people were present. You (Arun Naik) were also there. We had a big interaction. Then Dubey challenged me to do the play again myself. His shows were on, but he allowed me to do a parallel production.
Dubey's production was also produced by Unmesh?
I do not remember now but it must have been Theatre Unit's. In my production produced under Unmesh, we had only one chap and Vinay Apte played it. The girl was Chanda Joglekar (now Chanda Vaze, Achyut's wife). The agency woman was played by a Gujarati actress: Meenal Mehta (now Patel). She and Chanda had that look. Deepa Lagoo played an excellent aunt. All did well. I was quite happy with that production. We had many more shows than Dubey. We had about forty shows- mostly in Chhabildas that had just started then. So SOFA-CUM BED was our first Chhabildas play.
After SHADJA we did BHOPLYA: CHAL RE BHOPHLYA TUNUK TUNUK. It was also an Unmesh production, which was directed by Amol Palekar. We had done SHADJA for the state competitions, but it did not make it. We did BHOPLYA also for the state competitions. SHADJA was only one hour and 20 minutes, and so it was eliminated.
In BHOPLYA it is a search. The search was the fun. It was a simple thing: life itself is a search. By then I had realised how to make a play interesting. Our entire group was of theatre persons in the true sense. Each of us used to do every job. All were fully involved. We all found the whole process interesting. Everyone would attend each rehearsal and each show. We learnt to live with joy and enliven our circumstances with humour.
We recall that BHOPLYA was shown on TV. After that in Girgaon everyone would say 'Bus aali, bus aali', 'Kuthe aahe bus? Aapli naahi tee bus.' That became very popular. That is not possible now.
We did this play for a different audience. We did it in closed theatres as well as open acting spaces. BHOPLYA was done in 1970.
I saw it on the terrace of Sahitya Sahawas...
We even did a show in the mill area before a huge audience. About a thousand people thoroughly enjoyed it. The critics as well as the audience acclaimed the play but it also got mired in a controversy. Even Dr Lagoo was inspired and he wrote an article on parallel theatre in Maharashtra Times. Dubey was very angry after that and he did not speak to me for two and a half years.
Which production was accepted?
Ours. In all aspects. In fact my direction was very limited. I felt that it was a fairly good script and the actors also were fairly strong. In both plays, BHOPLYA and SOFA-CUM-BED, we had used levels and boxes. That is why the critics had called these plays 'thokalebaaz'. The lighting and the audio were good. People would neglect the audio, but we gave it a lot of importance. Vinod Doshi (Chairman of Premier Automobiles Ltd) used to do our audio. Even before his brother Shashank Doshi had his recording studio; Vinod had his own recording room at home. We would be invited and were given drinks and meals. He would make us listen to various pieces and we would spend 5-6 hours. But you are always under pressure of the opening show and have no patience. This would all happen in the night. But that enlivened the performance. Plus no expense! Giridhar More did the lighting. Raghu Bangera would assist him.
You wrote only for the parallel theatre. You never thought about mainstream theatre at venues like Shivaji Mandir?
I never did commercial theatre. I did not even do mainstream cinema. To put it more theoretically, let alone the purpose of art--but the purpose of theatre art...what do they typically say? 'Theatre is a reflection of life'. Theatre can also bring about a change in life. But why is theatre different from the other visual arts? Because in theatre the internal suffocation that the playwright, the director or the actors experience can be brought out in direct and intimate ways. That is not so true about cinema. You cannot do that in television either. And I think that is the most important aspect of theatre. I think playwrights around the world recognize this. I never took a stand that commercial theatre is bad. But we would ridicule the acting style of those days. Similarly, we too were ridiculed by them. Our styles had reached a stage that they actually started appearing ridiculous. Speaking illogically or incoherently is the real theatrical dialogue--that is what people then started feeling. That proved to be the limit. And then very odd kind of plays started coming up. 'Experimental' is 'incoherent'. This belief is senseless. The label of 'absurd' was stuck to our kind of plays. But each of our plays had a logic, they had a premise. It had some background. There may be absurdity in the presentation of these plays. That was because it was not meant to be directly realistic. In cinema scenes change fast. In theatre it is more static. In SOFA-CUM-BED all the scenes are short. People did not like it when we would cut a scene short just as it was blossoming into an emotional climax.
Brecht's theory is the same.
But Brecht had a definite stand. We did not have any such stand.
Brecht says that you do not take the play to its logical conclusion. You stop it beforehand. Now they use words like post-modernism. There is no logical connection between three consecutive sentences. The only way to describe it is to call it 'post-modern' because it is 'avant garde'; it is 'absurd', whereas you had not really used any 'absurd' techniques as defined by the absurdist playwrights. Absurdity of dialogues...of conversation of the kind you find in plays by Sartre, Camus, Ionesco...
Even Beckett, yes. But we were playing with words. You can find many examples in BHOPLYA itself. And there is more fun because there was no specific position that we took. There is humour. I think I have kept this play of words in my writing continuously. And if there is no play, then there would be no fun. We need that fun. However you may try to be tragic, yet that fun is necessary. I feel now as in ROMEO AND JULIET. . . I am doing RAMU ANI ZEENAT. The Hindu and Muslim names are evident. I am not doing something original, but though it is a tragedy, I have kept the fun element. There will be plenty of dance and music, like WESTSIDE STORY, with two young people. The background is a bit old: the late 80s, and post the Babri Masjid riots in 1992. But if you do not give it a humourous perspective, then you must not write. That is what I feel. There is no philosophical position in it like that of the absurd playwrights.
That position had been influenced by the war. So tell us, what was the economics like in the earlier times you did theatre?
The expenses at Chhabildas were low. There used to be a couple of very small advertisements. We almost had a natak company. We would make our own sets to suit our requirements from levels, boxes, curtains, different kinds of cutouts. All that we made ourselves. The lights belonged to the theatre. All our sets we used again in other plays. Like they do in the circus. We were not amateurs. We were professionals, but experimental. We would perform throughout the year. We would have 60-70 show in the year. And so we could afford all the expenses. We used to sell tickets ourselves initially. But later we stopped doing that as our tickets got sold at the box office before the show. And we had a specific audience.
Even now we have a specific audience for experimental plays. Now there are no experimental plays, and so it seems that there is no audience.
Every person, however well we knew each other, would always buy a ticket. There was no such thing as a pass. There were no complimentary tickets. Even the actor's father would buy his ticket. That was so with all groups, and the whole Chhabildas movement. Even 60-70 persons meant that the show cost was recovered. But when these plays were done in a larger theatre, the rent was killing. And by then the rents had also shot up. I remember that the advertisement rate was about Rs 6-7 per column centimeter. Then there were slabs and thus a limit on the size for concessional rates. Our ads were always small--only the announcement that there was a performance. Maybe just one tag line. That's all.
When did you do SAI-SAKHAR?
SAI-SAKHAR followed SOFA CUM-BED. I directed the play. I was not sure what I wanted to say in this play. But I had a definite idea that the play should happen this way. So I thought it would be better to do it myself. It was a visual play. Ratnakar Matkari has asked some basic questions: Exactly where does it happen? When the young man disappears, does he die? But such questions are so dull that there is no point in answering them. The play is like a picture. It does not have a complete story. It has a story, meaning that it has a movement. There cannot be a play without a movement. It is an image...a depressing image. A room is getting water-logged and the ceiling too starts leaking. It is the kind of suffocation which people experience individually and separately, and an agent is doing his sales talk. There is an old couple and a young couple. Rohini Hattangadi and Vinay Apte were the elderly couple and Jairam Hardikar and Sushma Tendulkar were the young couple. Jayant Kalgutkar was the agent.
SAI-SAKHAR was a completely different play as compared to your other plays.
Yes, here the plot was like that of a thriller. But it was not a suspense thriller. The play was pure imagery. We used music and songs. It was 'sub-kuch Achyut'. The play did not succeed to that extent because it did not reach the audience. The director has to accept the responsibility and I take it. The impact that I wanted I could not get. I did not repeat or revive any of my plays. Other people kept doing BHOPLYA and SHADJA. Ramdas Bhatkal, the publisher, and I could not really bring out any of my plays, except SHADJA.
I did PAUSACHA NATAK before SAI-SAKHAR during the Emergency. The famous Maharashtra Times critic Wa Ya Gadgil wrote that a new trend in the titles of plays had begun. The next one would be MEETH-BHAKAR. That was what theatre criticism used to be in those days.
There were many characters in PAUSACHA NATAK. I used to do a role meant for a non-actor. When the writer and the theatre person is the same man then he visualizes the play better. So we had visualized that we would do this play in housing colonies, and not do it in theatres at all. So if you visualize this way then the characters naturally become caricatures. There was a character called Sarkar. His side-kick was called Chuha, who would follow Sarkar with an ashtray. It was on a crude level and so it was fun. There is a Vesha Pramukh--VedhaShala Pramukh (head of the weather bureau). It was his job to count the clouds. So PAUSACHA NATAK is about the rain. But it never rains. The people are waiting for the rain. There was a solider - a Genet-inspired character. We had made the solider lovable, sojira-gojira.
And then a poet comes, who did not have to act. He just had to recite. There was a connection between the two. The play ended with elections round the corner. The Sarkar falls. It was on a crude level, but we enjoyed doing it. Even the audience enjoyed it. Lighting was mostly done in the open, so the lights were two halogens. We used our own property and kept it to the minimum because of transportation. There was an umbrella dance. When you do a play of images, then it is more difficult than the conventional play with a straightforward story. When things are done differently, people call it 'experimental'. Ultimately every play wants to say something. By images I mean the visuals which are used to convey different points. It was fun. The play lost its relevance when the Emergency ended, and so we closed it down.
Then we did LAGLA TAR GHODA, produced by Awishkar, and directed by Arvind Deshpande. It was a complete spoof. It had three spies: Pahila, Dusra and Tisra. The play ends with the discovery that they are brothers separated in their childhood. These three are searching for a computer which they think would solve all the nation's problems. They finally locate the computer: played by an actor! The computer reads out a long list of obvious solutions. It was all tongue in cheek and a comment on everything, such as moral policing. But the real issues facing the people never get addressed. By that time people had started feeling that my plays were necessarily farces. It was really very complex. Those who would come to see an 'experimental' play would get baffled by this play.
Then there were two one-acts, right?
Yes, one was MINI ANI BINI which was a completely visual play once again. I had the imagery of a French film in mind although I had not understood the film. But it inspired me. I used two characters. It was not performed. It was difficult to perform it the way I had written it. At the end the two girls wear paper dresses which they tear and become nude. You can cheat, but it is not possible to show it as it was visualized.
In RAVI ANI SHALU, the two eponymous characters go to a restaurant and call the waiter. The waiter is a bear. The audience is surprised, but Ravi and Shalu are not bothered. It is symbolic: the bear signifies that he is intruding in their relationship. It is a small play with a small theme.
I was working with the Tatas then. Everyone, including Nani Palkhiwala, was happy that I wrote. They encouraged it. But when I started my own business of producing for TV and when I had to write for TV, I could not find any time to write for theatre. My playwriting almost stopped. I realised that you cannot do creative writing along with commercial writing. You can work for others, do business, do good work, sincere work, and write. But you cannot do creative and commercial writing together.
In England, playwrights like Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, Robert Bolt, Alan Ayckbource... all have written for television.
That is because the audience there is used to their kind of writing. They were experimental playwrights, yet their plays are commercially accepted. Here to be commercial you had to write VAHATO HEE DURVANCHI JUDI. Now things have charged. It is surprising that TEEN PAISHYACHA TAMASHA can succeed commercially.
There was a big gap in your writing before you wrote SADU, TYACHI BAYKO ANI URLELE JAG.
I had earlier written one act of the play and had then abandoned it. I do not plan a play before I write it. So I do not know what course it would take.
You have again played on words in SADU...and that's the characteristic hallmark in your plays. It also demonstrates how a play like SADU...can be done differently by different people. You can still do it even if you remove the set of a local train compartment.
However what Jayant Pawar (Maharashtra Times) said about the play was also true: that it seems dated. When you use Akashwani, radio, you set the period. But the play is still relevant even today. Many people spend 50-70% of their time commuting by local trains in Mumbai. Even if you have a car, you can easily spend time in the traffic. This is a big tragedy and it is still today's tragedy. The picture has not changed. In fact it has become darker.
Arun Naik is a senior theatre critic, known for his Marathi translations of Shakespeare's plays. Vijay Kenkre is a respected theatre director who has also directed Achyut Vaze's recent play SADU, TYACHI BAYKO ANI URLELE JAG.
You were acclaimed in the 1970s and 80s as one of the three main playwrights in the Marathi parallel theatre along with Mahesh Elkunchwar and Satish Alekar. So how did it all begin?
