White elephant in the theatre

Mumbai's P L Deshpande Academy was revamped to make it into a cultural hub. Two years later it is still struggling.

In the last couple of years, the curtains have gone up at the P L Deshpande Academy, the swank auditorium at Prabhadevi in central Mumbai.

A home for Marathi theatre for the past 35 years (then christened Ravindra Natya Mandir), with its revamp in 2003, it has become a hub for a variety of cultural activities.

In addition, it serves as a venue for many corporate entitites to host their annual general meetings every year. More recently, the Marathi film industry congregated here to raise funds for tsunami relief.

From a dilapidated auditorium where local vernacular dramas were staged, it had re-opened as a state-of-the art facility after a seven-year renovation period. The renovated facility now also has a newly designed Kala Academy comprising an art gallery, an exhibition hall and a clutch of small halls for group meetings and lecture series.

So far so good. The crowds are trickling in, but many of the shows are bawdy regional plays and other community cultural events. Having spent Rs 50 crore on the revamp, the state government set up the Kala Academy to provide a more formalised curriculum and scholarships for those interested in theatre.

According to a bureaucrat involved in running the place, the objective of renovating it was to make it into a cultural hub catering to the promulgation of a variety of performing arts. "The academy was to become a self-sustaining endeavour," he says.

Two years later, it's still struggling to survive. The primary goal of providing a new forum for Marathi theatre also seems to have fallen by the wayside.

Why? Both the design and the choice of events have been responsible, claim critics. "It is a clash of politics and creativity," says a theatre director.

Marathi theatre stalwarts Vijay Tendulkar and Damu Kenkre consider the new building unsuitable to house an academy. States Tendulkar, "Instead of consulting representatives of cultural institutions, the government consulted IAS officers and ministers. There are no rehearsal halls in the building."

Concurs Kenkre, "There's no adaptable stage or an experimental theatre area." Maharashtra minister of culture, Ashok Chavan, however, disagrees. "They have all the facilities required to host both theatrical and academic environments."

Then, there is the appointment of bureaucrats as managing directors. Ajay Ambekar, who took over as the managing director last month, is the fourth director in two years. Says Tendulkar, "Cultural institutions require people who are involved in the area, not just have a strong interest in the area ."

Ambekar defends his appointment saying he is subordinate to a broader governing council of eminent cultural personalities. But where's the governing council right now? It's an invisible entity. A council, headed by film maker Jabbar Patel, was appointed in March 2004 and dismissed eleven months later in February 2005, with a change in state government. It was to have become an autonomous entity.

Chavan, however, states that autonomy is a near impossibility given that the government has paid for the construction of the Natya Mandir and owns the land.

Also, financial constraints, claim theatre goers, are diluting the quality of events held at the academy.

Two years after its inauguration, the Kala Academy is yet to take off. The rooms all lie vacant. It lacks the financial resources to hire teachers and buy materials. So the promoters are milking the cash cow "" the auditorium. The only show held at the Kala Academy has been an overview of Indian puppetry in March 2005.

In the last two years, the Natya Mandir has generated Rs 1.5 crore in revenues through rental fees. The cost of maintaining the entire premises is Rs 1 crore.

The excess revenue is not enough to fund the activities of the Kala Academy which requires roughly Rs 2.5 crore per annum. That's why annual general meetings have become regular here.

"The revenue earned will go towards the promotion of the Kala Academy. We are doing all this in a bid to promote culture," says Ambekar.

Kenkre says that with rent rates of Rs 15,000 per show, Marathi playwrights have reservations about performing here. Today, with enough carping, 100 days a year are reserved for Marathi theatre at a subsidised Rs 6,000 a show.

The rest is taken up by social gatherings of the Lions and Rotary Clubs, film previews and corporate training programmes which garner the facility Rs 5 lakh per month as compared to Rs 1 lakh earned from theatre activities.

Even so, with people not exactly banging on its doors, could it be yet another white elephant set up by the government?