Delhi-based Neel Chaudhuri is founder and Artistic Director of The Tadpole Repertory. Mumbai audiences may recall his play STILL AND STILL MOVING, which was part of the Writer's Bloc Festival in 2012. In 2010, he won the Hindu Metroplus Playwright award for his play TARAMANDAL. Among the younger generation of playwrights writing in English today, Neel's work is mature and promising. His group recently staged Shakespeare's THE WINTER'S TALE at an outdoor location in Delhi. The play which was performed in English and in Hindustani was executed superbly by its cast of young actors and highlighted its comedic aspects. We speak to Neel Chaudhuri about his group, of the plays that he has written and directed and of how independent theatre groups in Delhi like his continue to have faith in the theatre that they do.
Deepa Punjani
Deepa Punjani (DP): When did you embark upon the idea to have your own theatre company? What made you do it and why call it Tadpole?
Neel Chaudhuri (NC): Running a theatre company is not something I worked towards consciously. In fact, after I graduated from college, I didn't think it was possible to have a theatre job, which is why I studied film. But I got back to doing theatre in 2005 and began working with a group of people who, over the years, eventually became the members of Tadpole. It was after my first play POSITIONS (2006), which I wrote and directed that I began to feel a real sense of possibility.
Tadpole was officially formed in 2009, but the actors, designers and technicians that constituted the group had already been working together for 3 years. We knew that we had harnessed something and that we had done it together. It was a practice, an approach to storytelling, a certain attitude towards work and rehearsal, and most crucially, a desire to push forward despite the unsteady prospects of independent theatre in Delhi.
In POSITIONS, one of the characters imagines that he can see people's thoughts floating around their heads, like tadpoles. It's something that the actor improvised in rehearsal and it went into the script. When we were thinking of a name, Tadpole came up. It wasn't for any profound reason except that it seemed to signify something strange and energetic, and the manner in which the word came about in that play was symbolic of our practice.
DP: What was it like doing theatre while you were in college? Did that greatly influence your decision to continue doing it?
NC: I had mixed feelings about the theatre I was involved with in college - the Shakespeare Society at St. Stephens. Of course it was a very heady time and I was very close to many of the people I worked with. I performed in a production of Israel Horovitz's play LINE, directed by Ankur Khanna. The months that we spent working on that play and performing it around campus contained the spirit of everything I value most about the practice of Tadpole. It was difficult and exhilarating and completely immersive.
But the 'Shakesoc' could be a cliquey and at times, fractious group. We performed Shakespeare every year out of fidelity to tradition. It was important that I experienced all of that too because it made me acutely aware of how theatre practice could be insular and suffer for it.
But, yes, campus theatre had a great influence on me, and I continue to stay in touch with it.
DP: You write as well as you direct. That must be very helpful for your theatre practice...
STILL AND STILL MOVING (2012) Photo Courtesy: Kartikey Shiva
NC: It's strange that I wrote my first play because I wanted a piece to direct, and now I sometimes feel like I direct the plays I write because no one else will. Okay, that isn't entirely true. I've enjoyed that dual role very much in the past because our practice in Tadpole has allowed the two - writer and director - to overlap. Much of our work goes into the workshop space well before there is a script. In that sense, the actors are a very crucial part of the writing. Except for STILL AND STILL MOVING, my most recent play, I've always written for actors in the company. And many of those scripts contain directorial notes disguised as stage directions. But in the past two years I've had the niggling desire to stop directing my own work. I wasn't initially supposed to direct STILL AND STILL MOVING but there was only one person in Delhi I wanted to give it to and when he became unavailable I decided to do it myself.
I would like to be able to see how a play I've written can transform in someone else's hands. I'd like to be surprised, to watch it in performance and not feel that degree of responsibility for it, the kind that comes with being a director. I think it would be important for me as a writer, in the same way that directing other people's writing has opened up my experience.
DP: Who are the writers whose work has inspired you?
NC: My favourite playwrights are Chekhov and Pinter. I'd say their work has influenced me the most. The universe of a Chekhov play is so complete that I find it staggering sometimes. His work has a humanism that seems both studied and accidental, and he can be both ruthless and compassionate with his characters. I love this aspect in Pinter's work too, and of course his ear for dialogue and his use of silence.
I am also continuously inspired by the work of some of my fellow Indian playwrights. There are too many to name but I read of lot of that work and it makes me want to write more. That's the best kind of inspiration you can hope for.
DP: The plays you have written have been well-received. Is there a favourite amongst them?
MOUSE (2008) Photo Courtesy: Yashas Chandra
NC: Hah! That's a horrible question to ask of a writer. I don't know... I've never thought about this. MOUSE, perhaps ... a play I wrote for an actor-friend (and one of the founders of Tadpole) in 2007. MOUSE was a play with modest ambitions but looking at it now, it seems to contain the seed of all my plays that have followed it - both in form and matter. It is very close to me and yet, it is the play that we have performed least in the last six years. It is due a second life. Very soon.
DP: It was quite an experience to see your recent production of Shakespeare's THE WINTER'S TALE in collaboration with Anirudh Nair of Wide Aisle productions. There are several things to commend about the show but what was most impressive for me was that the actors demonstrated a mature command over the Shakespearean language. In your theatre, you do believe in investing the maximum into words and speech, don't you?
NC: I'm not sure if it is an investment in words and speech. Actually, with THE WINTER'S TALE, we began by trying to explore the text physically - using ideas based on Michael Chekhov's psychological gesture. So we began with the body. But yes, the actors in the play had a great command over Shakespeare's language. Many of them have worked on Shakespeare before, and they did do a lot of rigorous work on the text in rehearsal, using the rhythm and punctuation.
With Tadpole and specifically, my work as a director, I don't give preference to dialogue or words. For me everything has to amount to an act on stage that takes us from one place to another. I've noticed that often a scene is measured by the sum total of things that are spoken but dialogue has to have the same function as movement or gesture, and in rehearsal we demand as much from all those things. But yes, as a writer and director, I am very particular about the function of dialogue - about how it carries the rhythm of a moment, how it can use idiom to define a setting, how it can aspire to be both poetic and mundane, seemingly irrelevant but also incendiary.
THE WINTER'S TALE (2013) Photo Courtesy: Kartikey Shiva
DP: Does it help for your kind of theatre to be staged in alternative spaces? There were no tickets for THE WINTER'S TALE; you only requested donations and you had house full shows on all days at an atypical venue.. Do you think that with only such models young practitioners like yourself can do the theatre they want to?
NC: I think most independent theatre groups are aware of their constraints, and find ways to work within and beyond them. Renting a theatre in Delhi can be prohibitively expensive, so yes, a lot of us look at alternative spaces. Then, conversely, having work developed for and performed in alternative spaces makes you realise the exciting possibilities when you are not restricted to a conventional proscenium arrangement.
Our decision to work at Zorba the Buddha, an outdoor space, with the audience moving between locations, was something we reached before we even had a rough budget for the production. It ended being reasonable to rent and its landscape was already so vivid that we needed only to build a design to complement it. However, because of its status as a private venue, we were not able to charge tickets officially. The Pay What You Will scheme seems like a confident, inclusive model but the truth is also that we had to employ it. So it always seems like choices in the independent theatre are a mixture of design and circumstance. We really pushed ourselves to not be tied to our stringent means in THE WINTER'S TALE, and I do hope that the success of the endeavour projects that such a thing is possible.
DP: You wrote STILL AND STILL MOVING; the title appears to be inspired by the line from TS Eliot's 'Four Quartets'. It is a sensitively written love story between two men- one young and the other old and is set in Delhi. What got you to write it?
NC: Yes. It is Eliot. 'East Coker'. I love that poem and I was reading it at a time when I was struggling with the play. I read that play and it summarised perfectly the nub of the play.
I had wanted, for some time, to write a love story of two men, and to set it at two ends of the NCR - North Delhi, where I studied, and Gurgaon, where I lived for a while. This also brought into play the world of the Delhi Metro, the distance between as it were. With the metaphorical potential of train journeys being so exploitable, the Metro became a significant location. Every day as I travelled, I would observe the transient yet often intimate interactions of men on the Metro - strangers, friends or rivals for a moment.
Partho and Adil, the two lovers in the play, have their origins in another piece of writing, an abandoned short story from two years ago. I was trying to write about the untidiness of love, the fractures. I had wanted to write a different play at Writers Bloc but it didn't work out and so I turned to this unformed material.
DP: The city of Delhi is a source of inspiration for your writing. How would you describe your relationship with Delhi?
NC: Well, STILL AND STILL MOVING features Delhi - the NCR - unlike any of my previous work. The representation of the city in plays like MOUSE and ICH BIN FASSBINDER is limited to a very specific context. I have a love-hate relationship with the city. I have lived here for nearly ten years but I don't always feel like I belong here. Actually, any sense of belonging or ownership I have with Delhi has come with my work - the work of Tadpole and our place in the city. Like me, some members of the group and people we've worked with grew up in other cities and moved here in the last ten years.
Tadpole originated here and it is the most compelling reason for me to continue to live and work here. The cultural life in Delhi excites me. There is an artistic community, even if it somewhat splintered ... and it's not rare to find yourself in a crowd of writers, musicians, designers and other vagabonds. Haha! No, that last bit is shamefully romantic. But Delhi is also a troubled city, an angry city that provokes and disturbs me now and then. Not much of that has filtered into my writing yet, perhaps because I tend to block it out, but it will eventually and I don't quite know what form that will take.
DP: Do you have any grander plans for Tadpole? What will be you next project?
NC: Our grander plans - we would very much like to have our own space. It is a very long term ambition and I've no idea how it will happen, but there it is. It feels important to extend ourselves as producers, to collaborate with other artists and to invest our time in growing the theatre culture that we are a part of. We also have a theatre workshop series called The Looking Glass Project that we'd like to develop into a regular, full-fledged training module for children and adults.
I'm currently working on a new play, something I've been trying to write for five years now, and hopefully it will be produced next year with someone else directing. We have also just translated Abhishek Majumdar's AN ARRANGEMENT OF SHOES into Hindustani, which we will produce later this year along with a revival of THE WINTER'S TALE.
Deepa Punjani (DP): When did you embark upon the idea to have your own theatre company? What made you do it and why call it Tadpole?
