The other day, I was sitting in a theatre waiting for a show to start. I looked around at my fellow “punters” and realised that I was probably the tallest audience member present. Everyone else was about waist-high. No, this wasn’t some Alice in Wonderland nightmare; it was just Bombay theatre in summer.
The rise in temperature in the city now means only one thing for the theatre fraternity, children’s theatre. As soon as the schools close, children are “volunteered” for numerable workshops and activities. From Jazz dancing to pottery, all workshops are oversubscribed by parents desperate to get their kids out of the house. Naturally drama seems like a great way to spend the vacation therefore nearly every theatre institution or group holds summer workshops to meet this demand.
The most organised of this has been the Summertime at Prithvi programme, which over the years has developed a fierce reputation as hosting workshops which are both enjoyable and of great value. This year for the first time, the NCPA has got into the act. And under the new team led by Deepa Galhot, they are working hard to re-activate the sprawling campus.
Children’s theatre, however, has always worked in sporadic forms over the years. Pearl Padamsee and Shiraz Jeffereis were two stalwarts who tutored the children of J.B. Petit, Fort Convent, Campion, Cathedral, New Era and many more. Their work stemmed from theatre being a useful to tool to develop the personalities of the children, bring them out of their shell and improve their pronunciation. They created an army of very talented actors like Rahul Bose, Farid Currim, Aadya Bedi and many many others.
Hima Devi was another great general of children’s theatre. Under the Trinity College London (TCL) Speech and Drama programme, she coached children, and also directed plays which gave many young actors their first time on stage. Her productions of Merchants of Venice, Importance of Being Ernest and others introduced the classics younger children. In fact, for many years, the TCL programme was the only access children had to theatre, especially through the dedicated and consistent hard work of people like Meher and Noshirwan Jehangir.
In more recent years however there has been a shift; there are a new breed of drama teachers whose courses and workshops are almost a reaction to the formal exam-centric ways of TCL. The new logic being, why put them in a school type stressful environment when drama is supposed to trigger the imagination and be experienced not learnt by heart and regurgitated.
The Prithvi Summer Workshops, the new NCPA Summer Fiesta, and conductors like Roo Jhala are all breaking new ground by devising interesting and yet specific programmes around theatre. Theatre is no longer confined to speech and drama, but also includes puppetry, poetry, clay modelling, and a whole world of other things.
The plays too have changed over the years. The “foreign” classics have been abandoned for local stories. Punchatantra and Jataka Tales have been understandably popular. But the many plays have emerged, specially create for children, like Takadoom Takadish, Medha & Zoombish, and The Boy Who Stopped Smiling.
This year, however, the line up looks as classical as ever. Many old plays and stories are being retold in new avatars. Alice in Wonderland, Don Quixote, Peter Pan, Waiting for Godot, Arms and the Man are all part of the summertime line up. Plays that are ordinarily quite verbose and hard even for adults to understand are being decoded to reach out to the newest of theatre audiences.
As third bell rings and the lights begin to dim, and as my fellow audience members get excited by what is about to unfold, I can’t help but think of the productions of Pearl Padamsee, Shiraz Jeffereis and Hima Devi that I saw as child. Perhaps it was because of them that I fell in love with the theatre. So wherever they are, if they are listening — “thank you”.