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Photo: K.Bhagya Prakash

Scripting a difference Well-known theatre director Roysten Abel

Roysten believes that Girish Karnad’s script appealed to him beyond the idea of a plot or a story. “For me, theatre is all about conflict. When I read a play, I am not particularly looking for a plot. ‘Flowers’ had a very interesting conflict at its heart. And I liked it very much,” he says.

Asked about the emerging popularity of the genre of solo performances, as “Flowers” too has only Rajit Kapur who plays a priest torn between his dharma towards the king, and his role as a priest, and also equally torn between his kama, or desire for his wife and a beautiful courtesan.

In an excellently choreographed setting with the smell of jasmine and incense wafting through the pale blue light on the stage, the audience was welcomed to the world of desire and God. Tracing his own highly successful career of the last decadeas one of India’s leading contemporary theatre directors, Roysten went down memory lane about his training days at NSD.

“Obviously, I discovered my talent at NSD. We did a lot of things in the classroom like experimenting with ideas, and we learnt how all of them fail on stage. Yes, my years here have indeed helped me a lot,”says Roysten, as a tribute to his alma mater. About the predominance of visual spectacles in his plays, Roysten responds, “I have learnt theatre from cinema. All my great masters are from the world of cinema. However, I think ‘Flowers’ is strongly theatrical. What more do you need than a phallic stump or a shiva linga perched horizontally on a stage and a solo narrator sitting or standing on it?”

Roysten was noticed with his play, “Othello – A Play in Black and White,” a production that went beyond the classical Shakespearean story and it won the Scotsman Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festivalin 1999.

But Roysten is vocal about his dislike for cinema. “I don’t really enjoy doing cinema because there is a huge responsibility on you. You are handling others’ money and therefore, there is less freedom and more constraints. Theatre is any day more relaxing and enjoyable for me,” he says.

His other works include “The Spirit of Anne Frank”, “Romeo And Juliet,” “Love: A Distant Dream,” “The Two Penny Opera,” “School for Wives” and “Jiyo”, an Indo-Spanish play.

He has also been working with folk musicians creating theatre in music with his two productions, “Manganiyar Seduction”, involving 50 Manganiyar musicians, and “A Hundred Charmers”, with a hundred snake charmers from Rajasthan. Roysten becomes eloquent about the theatricality of the Manganiyar singers, “Theirs is a complete theatre. They breathe theatre in everything that they say. They have angika, vacika, and aharya in their abhinaya. I have worked with actors who are intelligent and skilled, however, with these folk singers it is a totally different experience.” Roysten believes that these singers transcend the rational limitations of trained actors . “The most beautiful part of these musical performers is that they are not intellectual, they are beyond the mind. Theexperience is fantastic.”

Though Roysten, the director, is notorious for altering and appropriating the dramatic text, in “Flowers”, he, for a change, retains the script verbatim. “I didn’t want to change the form of the text – we have decided to follow it word by word. As the play has a single character, a narrating priest, it was given that I will stage it like that. Though, it is an extremely difficult task for the actor and I am infamous for altering the script,” he chuckles.

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