A perceptive playwright

"MY INDIAN mother tongue is English," laughs Chetan Shah, who belongs to the rare species we call playwrights. Born in Chennai to a Gujarati father and Maharashtrian mother, educated in Lawrence School, Lovedale, and Oakham School, England, with an Honours degree in philosophy from Cambridge, Shah does his creative writing in angrezi. His "The Lizard Waltz" is to be premiered on November 27, staged by the Madras Players, as part of their celebration of "The Year of the Chennai Playwright".

Chennai playwright? Yes, the term seems an anomaly. This city is no place for serious theatre, even in Tamil. It has few playwrights, beyond an Indira Parthasarathy or a Na Muthuswami. English plays have no market here, especially those written by Indians and produced by local crew. Yet, Shah came out with "Slow Dissolve" in 1990.

This was before Mahesh Dattani and Manjula Padmanabhan made a mark in the genre. Shah recalls the problems he faced in writing an English play. "English is spoken widely in this country but there are so many variations depending on age group, class and region. Anyway, I did not want to simply copy the way people spoke in real life, throwing in a few Indian words to make it seem authentic. To make dialogues work on stage, you have to transform the language of everyday, give it vigour, vitality and form."

He continues after a pause. "Nor was I translating speech from an Indian language into English. My characters were English speaking, upper class Indians. At that time, there was no tradition for that kind of thing. I had to invent a new idiom." He believes that "The Lizard Waltz" has more fluent writing than "Slow Dissolve" where he agonised much more over this task.

Though written as a teleplay, "Slow Dissolve" was staged by the Madras Players in 1990 and again this year, with some minor updating.

"The Lizard Waltz" was a more integrated effort, evolving through six drafts, each written after weekend readings by the Madras Players, based on which Shah made revisions and cuts. Says Shah, "Also, I am more familiar with the tools of the trade now, with a better grasp of plot, character, tone and methods of crafting scenes."

Ask Shah why he hasn't written more than two plays and a playlet in ten years and he will explain regretfully, "Where is the commercial viability? You have to do it out of passion and self- motivation. Writing does not come easily to me. I need weeks on end to be by myself first. How do you do it when you hold a job?"

His themes are the outcome of his personal encounters with the big and small screens. Back from England where he had been making experimental films as member and later president of the film unit in Cambridge, Shah underwent a culture shock when he tried to break into the Madras film industry.

Put off by "the norms, rigid hierarchy and personality worship" of the commercial set-up, Shah started his own Cinetel Communication to make documentaries, educational, ad and corporate films. "The frustration of not being able to do features went into my writing." That is how "Slow Dissolve" emerged.

Television was the next option. Here, Shah did his own scripts, as for "Sangharsh". He made a short film last year, turning Asokamitran's short story into "Final Curtain".

The Madras Players "were after me to write another play in 2000," and Shah took a year's sabbatical to do it. "I made notes over the year, the characters and images were formed in my mind." He may never have done it but for the laptop. "Suddenly, it was possible to feed the computer at random, and produce a play through a simplified process of shuffling and shifting!"

The new play is set in a television studio. The protagonist hosts an "agony" show, examining people's emotional problems with a ruthless, clinical rationalism, whereas what people want is not cold solution but sympathy and hand holding. Says Shah, "In the last decade, we have learnt more about human beings than in the past two millennia. I am passionate about evolutionary biology and neurosciences that help us understand ourselves. My play is about the design of human behaviour, and the mental mechanisms which manifest it."

In simpler terms, the abstract, metaphysical theme depicts the collision of the animalian instincts of man with the traditional humanist views. "We have a simplistic, distorted picture of human beings. But science has now opened up the hidden agendas in our brain which propel us, and which are opaque to introspection," he says. Humans are driven by self serving, survival needs; our values emerge from instincts, not reason; our emotions are transient, fluctuating; we continue to be as reptilian as the lizards, our hoary ancestors."

Such ideas are not new, you say. Shah replies that they have been given a new treatment. Besides, "I am linking the concept to science, not making direct social criticism." He tries to show how understanding is arrived at when we step out of ourselves, not by looking inward.

Meanwhile, he has not stopped dreaming about making feature films. "The climate is changing now, there is a place for everything in the current world." If webcasting becomes common, a whole new market will open up for specialist viewership.

And then, events like the staging of "The Lizard Waltz" will find their niche market and help playwrights like Chetan Shah into productive channels of cinema, drama and theatre, their creativity unhampered by commercial constraints.

GOWRI RAMNARAYAN

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