Hachette India

Sightlines

Shernaz Patel

Every three years, over the last decade, the Mumbai-based theatre group RAGE - in collaboration with the Royal Court Theatre in London - organizes the Writers' Bloc Workshop. Offering a much-needed artistic retreat to playwrights, this workshop allows aspiring and professional playwrights a chance to perfect their scripts with established actors and professionals from within the industry. Apart from encouraging them to break free from the rigid boundaries of English theatre in India to fashion their own idiom, the workshop also ensures its playwrights access to the final pilgrimage of any script - the stage. As it stands today, the infamous debate on whether an Indian play written in English mirrors a bona fide Indian reality is no longer relevant. Using a vocabulary that is entirely their own - 'unaffected, homegrown and lyrical' - the three plays in this collection convincingly capture the peculiar accents and the particular chaos of our times. Rahul Da Cunha's Pune Hig>

Shernaz Patel

Jaeza 14.00 The Rage trio - Shernaz Patel, Rahulda Cunha and Rajit Kapur - joined forces in 1993. Our vision statement was simple - 'Do plays without an eye to the box office' .We opened curtains with an AIDS based double header called Are There Tigers in the Congo? The play's fate at the box office was critical acclaim combined with commercial disaster. In 1996, came a turning point in our journey when we adapted Herb Gardner's comedy I'm Not Rappaport for the Indian stage. Re-titling it I'm Not Bajirao, this play about two octogenarians fighting to stay afloat in a ruthless urban world caught the fancy of Indian audiences of every age. The result was ten years of performance, 200-odd shows and the birth of a new Indian English dialect in the theatre. In 2000, we went 'musical'. We staged an ambitious production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar starring forty actors, dancers and performers. By 2002, we committed ourselves totally to indigenous theatre with plays like Class of 84, a play about seven ex-Xavierites re-uniting, followed by Pune Highway, a thriller about testing friendship in extreme circumstances and Me, Kashand Cruise, a tale about the changing face of Bombay, over 22 tumultuous years. Other memorable productions include Girish Karnad's Flowers, Anuvab Pal's Chaos Theory, and One on One, an evening of contemporary Indian monologues. Our focus over the last ten years has been on modern Indian writing and we have built up a formidable audience following, with many of our plays crossing the 100 and 200 show marks. Rage has not only regaled audiences in India, but also in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Dubai, Germany, London, Malaysia, Seoul, Singapore, Sri Lanka and the United States.