Production to product

Theatre's younger professionals are not just creating fresh, innovative acts, they are finally learning to market these too.

"Language is the least important part of the play," Neel Chaudhuri, a young writer, director and now associated with the New Delhi-based First City Theatre Foundation, an endeavour to encourage fresh, innovative plays, tells me before I go to watch his production this week. It's a fair warning.

Mouse is a monologue but not in the conventional sense. It's also a play within a play. What you have on stage then is an actor, "in character", complete with a mouse mask, within his space that's the mouse hole, and an incessantly chattering director who wants to take him through the paces one last time before the play begins.

Mouse stays silent but conveys much with his wonderful body language, while the director's "monologue" (it is that) "" including some smart alec-y liners designed to go down well with just about any audience "" leaves you with pretty much nothing.

Ideas of isolation and alienation at the work place (but also in life in general), limitations, frustrations, the ego and even the seeming nothingness of it all are quite effectively conveyed using this device.

In a critique, it would be tempting to draw in Existentialism here. But in the end, what I went back home was just one powerful image "" Mouse dancing in a circle in his circumscribed space, following a single stream of light from the director's flashlight as if it were a string.

A dog on a leash, a speedometer needle, pointlessly moving back and forth in an arc... I did not much like Chaudhuri's other play, Positions, that had formerly made a debut at the British Council about a year ago and was part of the same evening's entertainment. But that does not matter. Mouse represents an interesting beginning.

Despite the lure of films, television and easier living still taking away much of theatre's professional talent and there being a lack of funds for productions, particularly more serious, less "glamourous" ones in languages other than English, the stage today is attracting fresher blood than ever.

You may complain that the audience is still elitist, the sponsors only for certain kinds of productions and while that may not be entirely untrue, there are people making new beginnings and stretching boundaries at a very professional level even as they try to find viable models to make their artistic endeavours self-sustaining.

"We don't believe in going to the corporates with a begging bowl," says Rahul Pulkeshi of Dream Theatre who created a mega-spectacle by way of adapting and staging William Dalrymple's City of Djinns last year, complete with live Sufi qawwals, real characters from old Delhi, including snake charmers, calligraphers, kebabwallahs and tangewallahs and pyrotecnics (not to mention a stellar cast by way of Tom Alter and even Zohra Sehgal in a minor role) at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts (IGNCA).

Airtel was a sponsor "" though Pulkeshi insists his company only works with "partners" ""and several thousand people turned up to watch the production.

Pulkeshi, whose heart lies in music and whose idea of theatre is a melting pot for music, choreography and, of course, drama (should we call it a musical then? he refuses to be slotted, calling it "total theatre") et al is now preparing to come up with equally novel acts this year.

In April-May this year, his production Bring Down the Walls will delineate precisely such an ideal and later, there is to be a take on the Mahabharata (based on Shivaji Sawant's book; the epic through Karna's point of view) complete with hard rock and, er, circus.

But is this really "theatre" or the equivalent of Karan Johar cinema? Purists may scoff but Pulkeshi's is a novel approach certainly. "Theatre is not what you only associate with jhollawallahs," he says and is candid that he treats his productions as products "on the shelf in a Reliance store.

If they get eyeballs, the money will follow." To build a group where he would need to employ at least 50-60 people on an annual basis, Pulkeshi is clear that he needs to talk sound business and, yes, marketing, necessary if people are to take up theatre professionally.

At the First City Foundation, artistic director Chaudhuri takes a less drastic line. But the effort is the same. A St Stephen's alumnus (where he was a part of the college's Shakespeare Society and collaborated in his final year to come up with an original play), Chaudhuri, nevertheless, opted to study film in the UK "because at that point, I thought it would be better for my career".

Now, full time with his first love, the idea, says Chaudhuri, is certainly to encourage original work "" his own and other young people's, many straight out of college.

To find funds to sustain this is not easy and Chaudhuri is seeking to first establish the Foundation's credentials through "good work".

Another route would be grants but more than that Chaudhuri hopes to generate funds from workshops, play readings and classes for amateurs. So, let's wait for the action.