Neelam Mansingh has spearheaded the resurgence of Punjabi theatre and adapted world classics for the Indian stage. Neha Bhatt turns the spotlight on another facet of her career — innovative set designs.
It’s the opening scene of Neelam Mansingh’s play The Suit and the actors, a man and his wife, are waking up to a bright new day. The stage, at Delhi’s British Council Auditorium, is laid out with a bed in one corner, and in the other, a metal arch-like structure with steps moving to a higher level, beneath which is a kitchen — complete with gas stove. As the husband lights the stove, and puts water and milk to boil for a cup of chai, you wonder…a gas stove on stage? Isn’t it dangerous in a closed auditorium?
But then this is a play by Mansingh, known for using fire, smoke, water, oil and food — things that other directors would find too messy — on-stage, to make her plays come alive, and blending these with carefully-chosen symbolic props, to suggest a psychological state.
For instance, later in The Suit, the wife steps into a tub and splashes water with her foot, the action expressing the turmoil in her mind. Similarly, in Little Eyolf (which will be performed at this year Bharat Rang Mahotsav, the National School of Drama’s annual theatre festival), the actor is shown expressing his angst by working up soap bubbles in a water tray. In her adaptation of Girish Karnad’s Nagamandala, the Chandigarh-based veteran director went so far as to place a huge pond on stage.
“Every artistic decision has to be practical too. So whatever I design is always easy to execute. In fact, everything in theatre comes from my role as a housewife. How do we use everyday things as metaphors? How do you seek beauty in something as mundane as washing?”
The best instance of this “housewife-like” approach to set design was Kitchen Katha, a play Mansingh did a few years ago. Food and a woman’s relationship with cooking being the theme of the play, Mansingh had a real kitchen on stage. The audience could actually smell the coriander and the anar seeds being cooked, and hear the crackling sound of frying and the gurgling of water. The songs in the play were recipes, while the background music were the sounds chutney being ground, food being churned in the kadhai, and the clunking of utensils being washed.
“We have explored the sense of touch and sound on stage but never smell,” Mansingh says of her sets for Kitchen Katha design, confessing also that some of her own love of cooking spilled over on the stage. Mansingh conceives the sets herself, only taking the help of her sons, the younger of whom is an art director in Bolywood, for the execution. “Children, of course, always help out half-heartedly,” she laughs.
But innovative set design is not the only reason Mansingh is today such an important figure in cotemporary Indian theatre. Far more significant is what she’s done for Punjabi theatre, working with rural and urban actors, blending contemporary themes and even a few words of English, with folk themes and culture.
When Mansingh first moved to Chandigarh 25 years ago, it was at the height of the Khalistan insurgency, and no one spoke Punjabi, especially in urban areas. “I realised it wasn’t a sophisticated-sounding language like Bengali, but then a language is not only in sounds, it’s in the aesthetics too. I wanted to change the image of Punjabi as a crude language spoken by truckdrivers,” she says. Indeed, The Company, which Mansingh started two decades ago, has been at the forefront of the regional theatre movement.
Mansingh’s other contribution has been to adapt the best of world literature to the Indian milieu, setting it in a contemporary context, in a way that makes it her own. Little Eyolf, for example, is virtually unrecognisable from Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s original, and if you didn’t know it was Ibsen, you would have thought it was a Punjabi folk tale. Her preference for classics has even been panned, but Mansingh does not agree with such criticism. “I don’t think of it that way. I may like the work of Dorris Lessing, but I should be able to relate to it personally. For example, The Suit is adapted from a very short story by South African writer Can Themba. We improvised on that. The story originally has undercurrents of apartheid. But that doesn’t work in the Indian context. But a relationship like marriage in the story seemed powerful for me to develop, so we made that the core of the play,” Mansingh explains.
She is hard at work now, rehearsing a play based on Tagore’s letters — her last play, she has threatened. “But every time I do a play, I say this will my last one,” Mansingh makes light of the issue.
Adapting literary works to theatre is a training Mansingh attributes to the two great influences on her life — B V Karanth, with whom she worked on his repertory theatre Rang Mandal in Bhopal for a long time, and Ebrahim Alkazi, who was her teacher at NSD.
“Their teachings altered the way I looked at text.” Speaking of the very different approaches of the two thespians, she says, “Karanth was a complete anarchist, working within themes of folk culture. Alkazi was more of a Renaissance man, an epic teacher and a completely hands-on person. He would teach you every little aspect of a performance, right from cleaning the stage. He broke the myth of being just an actor. He was a one man institution.”
It was Karanth who encouraged Mansingh to revive local theatre in Punjab when she moved back to the north Indian city where she grew up. Mansingh was hesitant at first, but once she brushed up her Punjabi, she felt more confident.
Elkazi, of course, was the one who inspired her to take up theatre. “I enjoyed reading books on art when I was young, but it was all very peripheral. Then I saw Alkazi’s Othello and I couldn’t imagine that this kind of theatre was possible. Alkazi spoke a language that I hadn’t heard before. He represented a world which was unfamiliar yet fascinating. But theatre wasn’t seen as a career option, especially coming from small town,” she says. Her mother was a housewife, father a doctor, and after college, Mansingh had to choose between settling for an arranged marriage and studying further. Mansingh chose the NSD.
It hasn’t been all easy going. Like any theatrewallah, Mansingh faces many infrastructural and financial obstacles, but her complaints are gentle and show an aesthetic grace that are also the hallmark of her personality. “I have been able to do whatever I have only because I have lived in a small town. Here in Chandigarh, I teach theatre at the University, I am chairperson of the department, and I manage a home and my theatre group at the auditorium in my home . I wouldn’t have wanted to live and work in Delhi, it’s insane out there,” she says.
Neelam Mansingh’s Little Eyolf will be staged at the Kamani Auditorium, New Delhi on January 19, at 6.30 pm (Ph: 011-23073647)
