Thespo (the discovery of India road trip)

Thursday, 10 December 2015

I have a rather close bond with Thespo - my favourite theatre festival. It provided me with great relief in what I see as the dark years of my identity crisis. Those were the days when parents worried about what I would make of my life. Keen on helping, they pressured me to choose between Chartered Accountancy and a Masters of Business Administration. I did occasionally cave into these pressures, but only to drop out of the various coaching classes I enrolled with. They realised that I would often miss my CA coaching classes to hang out to the office of Q Theatre Productions, which were the Thespo headquarters on 26 July 2005 – the day when torrential rains flooded Bombay like never before or since – and I had to stay there for a few days. They warned me not to waste my time with theatre thereafter. When I decided to not head their warnings, and to be part of the production team for the festival anyway, they asked me to choose between staying at home and Thespo. The choice was obvious. It was going to be the place where I had the space to think for myself, be respected for who I was, and which let my creative energies freely flow. I chose Thespo.

As luck would have it, we arrived in Bombay during Thespo, and there was no way I was going to miss it. Braving jetlag and fatigue, I decided to go watch a few performances at Prithvi Theatre, which is one of the festival venues. Curious about the cultural scene in Bombay, Joline, Fabian and Tim (I will collectively refer to them as JF&T) decided to join too. So, after the walk, we were off to Thespo.

We first watched a fringe performance called Dekho, Magar Pyar Se [Watch, but with love]. It was a one-person performance about sexual identity and the struggles of sexuality minorities in India. It is so easy to turn this sensitive subject into either a farce or a sermon, but the actor did a fine job depicting the Indian reality on the subject, succinctly, expressing the playwright’s and the director’s position clearly, yet respecting the audience’s right and ability to think for itself.

The play started by playing a glamourised adaption of the Indian national anthem, while projecting highly sexualised images of male Bollywood actors, which are widely broadcast on television. It seemed that the joke was lost on much of the audience, which dutifully stood in attention to what was not the national anthem, but perhaps they stood up in order to prevent a riot that otherwise might have erupted. The creativity was well displayed when the actor improvised and pointed at JF&T, to assign blame for the perversion of Indian gender values on the white-skinned west. The play was provocative and engaging, not only in its script, but also in the acting. It was the best performance I have seen in a very long time.

The main play for the evening was a Marathi play called “Hero” started at 21:00, by when our jetlag got the better of us, and we fell asleep during the first of the play’s eight scenes. The slapstick comedy did not help entertain us, but the peals of laughter from the audience kept waking us up from time to time. Into the fourth scene, we decided to make a swift exit during the next blackout.