Playback theatre, Bengaluru

Last night, I was at a performance by Playback Theatre, Bengaluru, and this morning, the omniscient Wikipedia told me what it means: “Playback Theatre is an original form of improvisational theatre in which audience or group members tell stories from their lives and watch them enacted on the spot.”

Turning back a few pages, it was possibly in the 1980s when I watched some of Badal Sarkar’s plays after he took theatre out of the proscenium. During those performances, the audience used to sit on the four sides of a bare hall with zero props, with their backs to the wall and the actors were in the middle. They would directly interact with the audience and often, different men and women would play out different parts of the same play at the same time on two or more parts of the hall. It was an experience.

I do not remember all the Badal Sarkar plays that I lived through on the first floor of the Theosophical Society premises off College Street in Kolkata. It was a fascinating combination, some guys reportedly got in touch with ghosts on the ground floor, even as Badal Sarkar’s ruthless realism played out on the first floor. I watched Michil (Procession) and Bhoma, and a few others there. But what I experienced last night was even more fascinating, and in a moment, I’ll explain why.

There were four actors, three girls and a boy in their twenties, two musicians, a boy who played different instruments and a girl who played the guitar and sang beautifully. The seventh member of the team, the anchor person, got the audience involved in the performance. Last night’s proceedings began with a simple question “How do you feel now?”

A young man sitting next to me said he had taken four Uber rides during the day, and all the four drivers had been Muslims. He said that he hadn’t interacted much with two of them, but with the other two, both driver and the passenger ended up crying together. The moment he stopped, a girl was driving a taxi and the four actors performed the narrator’s experience with an incredible degree of understanding and sophistication. I was dumbstruck. How did they work so well without any preparation? Could they read each other’s mind?

From there, the compere moved on to how the audience felt (after three days of pogrom in Delhi). From there, the discursive conversation moved on to “resistance” and how individual members of the audience was initiated to the idea of resistance. Someone got the idea from penny-less, cast-away former freedom fighter in his early childhood, someone when she studied the Jim Crow Laws at a university in the US and related the caste system she had lived through as a child without ever realising there was anything wrong about it.

The brilliant ensemble brought to life each one of those experiences.

It was so heartening to see these young men and women, who have such depth and who have to offer so much to us. Once again, I thought we must not lose hope. Our future is bright!

Thursday, 27 February 2020