ESSAY: Queer Themes in Mumbai TheatreVEER TOWARDS QUEER
This article was first published in Mid-Day (7th Jan 2011)
Urban theatre in Mumbai has always prided itself as being a few steps ahead of the game, in terms of how progressive texts have been traditionally embraced within this space. Homosexuality is being gradually eased out of the closet in India. The world of cinema has grappled with this by serving up an array of propaganda pieces that have tried to educate and sensitize the mass-audience that such multiplex fare mistakenly believes it has at its disposal. The world of theatre, by contrast, is a parallel universe that caters to a niche—what its practitioners believe to be a well-read bunch of people already firmly ensconced in a liberal ‘bubble’— but nonetheless, even this insular, impervious world has been waking up to the possibilities of a new kind of representation, and more and more plays have been staged this year either with overriding or subtextual gay themes, or prominent characters who are queer.
In the past, there have been plays like Ek Madhavbaug by Chetan Datar, in which a mother tries to come to terms with her son’s homosexuality, and the dramatization of Ismat Chughtai’s lesbian short story Lihaaf in Naseeruddin Shah’s Manto Ismat Hazir Hain, but those efforts have been few and far between. In many ways it has been a muted revolution because queer expressions within theatre don’t necessarily lend themselves to attention-grabbing headlines. For example, the Akvarious production of All About My Mother, adapted from the Almodóvar classic, featured noted thespian Ratna Pathak-Shah in the role of an aging diva a la Bette Davis, who has a tempestuous relationship with her co-star as they perform together in a Spanish revival of A Streetcar Named Desire. This was a well-heeled veteran of the stage taking on the role of a lesbian, but very tellingly, it scarcely created as much noise in the media as say, Payal Rohatgi playing one in a B-film (Men Not Allowed, as it was called).
In the play, one of the changes to the original script was to let the relationship between the two women unfold before its audience with tenderness rather than strife. In the film, the women are at each other’s throats from the outset, here, we are first shown a semblance of domestic bliss, probably to cater to the politics of representing a minority in an appropriately positive fashion. In all this pussy-footing around, some members of the audience walked away thinking that the two women were actually mother and daughter.
Questions regarding how to go about portraying a gay relationship have also intrigued producer-director Sunil Shanbag, whose play Dreams of Taleem had its run through 2010. In this play about a stage director, Anay, seeking to stage Ek Madhavbaug (as a play within the play) with a reclusive actress, we are first introduced to the interior world that Anay shares with his male lover, Yash. Says Mr Shanbag, “I saw this as a groping attempt to explore an alternative set of beliefs. I felt the boy in Chetan’s play needed a fuller representation, a more nuanced representation. In today’s world, relationships have been forged between young men that can now be played out in the open. I’ve tried to make this relationship tender. But it was very important to bring in a physicality to it to convey the level of intimacy between the men.”
The love-making scene in Dreams of Taleem proved especially educative for the actor Anand Tiwari, who played Yash. During a run-through, when his shirt was ripped open and his co-actor touched his bare chest for the first time (during rehearsals they had been fully clothed), Mr Tiwari was suddenly taken aback. He says, “I had always thought of myself as being very open about these things. But as soon as I felt a man touching my chest, it just threw me off completely. I had never imagined that I’d be so stiff in reaction to a mere touch, I didn’t know how to react to it instinctively.” In a way, that experience made him better able to grasp the sexuality of his character as something real and tangible.
The connection between touch and intimacy was also explored in a recent revival of Equus, in which director Daniel D’souza played the lead role of a young man with a sexual fascination for horses, played by bare-chested actors, one of whom was to be straddled, and ridden, bareback and naked (there is no actual nudity in the Indian production), in what proves to be a rather homo-erotically charged scene. “The sexual tension between me and the actor was perfectly appropriate for what was required on stage. I touched the horses, but no-one touched me. In the end, when I had completely broken down, the doctor takes me in his arms. I wanted a clear divide between physicality and the intimacy of two bodies coming together”, says Mr D’souza. Equus has seen many revivals over the last few years, and has chalked up many of the subtextual portrayals that have led queer audiences to believe that they are visible in some way on stage.
As can be gleaned, a lot of the queer portrayals on the Mumbai stage have been derived from international works. One on One was a series of ten-minute monologues, one of which portrayed gay bashing. Lovepuke, which opened this year at the NCPA, featured an alpha male who discovers that he could possibly be interested in men. Akvarious Productions hasn’t shied away from introducing queer concepts in their plays All About Women and A Guy Thing. All About My Mother remains one of their more important works and while Ms Pathak-Shah, with an arsenal of pithy one-liners, was decidedly in scenery-chewing mode, the scene-stealing was left to Mr Tiwari, in yet another queer role, that of the transsexual, Agrado, which proved to be an entirely different ball-game for the actor. In Dreams of Taleem, he had steered away from the stereotypical tics that actors playing gay usually take recourse to, as Agrado he had to embrace performing in drag. In stilettos, and a toned down falsetto, he regaled us with a truly bravura performance. “What I found most interesting was sharing a green room with women, and having a female co-star help me change into my clothes. They seemed much more comfortable with me as Agrado than as the man I was. I didn’t feel awkward at all. In fact, I couldn’t stop looking at myself, padded bras and all,” says Mr Tiwari. It was a blurring of lines that proved to be rather liberating.
During the staging, as we enter the theatre at Prithvi, we are accosted by a gaggle of men in drag handing us pamphlets, trying to stare us down with come-hither looks, and it’s a reminder of how urban theatre seats itself within a citadel of bourgeoisie. There is a sub-culture of transsexual prostitution in Mumbai’s own underbelly but this isn’t the world that would ever be referenced in plays such as these. In one scene, Agrado is flung to the ground by a man looking to rape him. It’s dramatic, and exotic, and in a Spanish setting. Sexuality has an European twang, almost.
The politics of representation aside, Mr Shanbag had other lessons in store when trying to court a queer audience for his play. Activists felt that he had vilified Chetan Datar, even though the so-called biographical elements being cited were purely co-incidental. He looks back, “In Bangalore, we had audiences who were completely out of all the politics that was burdening this play. They sat there, they watched the play for what it is, and it was a great response. Those three performances made me ten times more confident of the play. Thank God for that, since after doing shows in Pune we were a battered lot.” When watching Mona Ambegaonkar’s heart-felt but unchallenging interpretation of Ek Madhavbaug at the Kashish Queer Film Festival, he retrospectively felt that Dreams of Taleem was too painful for a queer audience looking for something lilting, or hopeful, or anything that engineers a collective catharsis. But that is what makes theatre different. Hand-holding is not a pre-requisite, nor is dumbing down.
It is too early to say whether queer theatre is here to stay, whether in the form of sporadic little ventures or a sensibility that permeates and enriches the existing mindset. Sometimes, the importance of latching on to a bandwagon results in a kind of self-importance that masquerades as art. “Liberalism is sometimes displayed using the crutches of queer theatre,” feels Deepa Gahlot, theatre critic, and director of programming at the NCPA. At other times, there is that old nefarious vanguard of self-censorship. At the NCPA Centrestage Festival, one of the more well received plays was the delightful Aaj Rang Hai which sought to present the philosophy of the Sufi saint Amir Khusro, against which a poignant Hindu-Muslim love story was played out drawing upon the love legends that Khusro had himself talked about in his writings. However, the writer of the play saw fit to excise from this narrative the bond between Khusro and his mentor, Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia. The qawwali from which the play takes its name, is a paean to this spiritual (and queer resonant) love between the two men. In the play, it is merely a song about the festival of colors. Clearly, a lot of ground remains to be covered before this story and many others can be told without compunction.
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