Anupam Kher in Kuch Bhi Ho Sakta Hai.

A few months ago I watched Chris Larner recount how he took his ex-wife to Dignitas in Switzerland to complete her wish for “assisted suicide”. The performance entitled An Instinct for Kindness, was gut wrenching. From the first minute you knew what was going to happen and yet he managed to surprise you with the beautifully simple telling of a very personal event.

At the time I marvelled at his ability to recreate the performance night after night. I got my answer fifteen minutes later in the NCPA parking lot when a young girl came up to him and said, “Thank you for the performance.
Can I give you a hug?” And as she hugged him, he broke down. Clearly, this show was not easy to do.
In the theatre we are constantly told to look for the “truth”. But often that is the hardest thing to put on to stage.
Playwright Ram Ganesh Kamatham has often told me that most play-writing is autobiographical. A playwright can “only write what s/he knows”, and if a story is external to the playwright then s/he must research the characters and experiences to make it personal. Only then will a “true” play emerge.
Very often playwrights pick stories from experiences they have had. Purva Naresh’s wonderful Ok Tata Bye Bye, for example, about a woman who is making a documentary film about a community of sex workers, is directly inspired from her own journey in making a similar documentary film.
But what if the stories are not yours? Eve Ensler’s monster hit The Vagina Monologues has very specific guidelines about its staging.
The play is a collection of interviews that Ensler conducted with hundreds of women from different cultures. To keep with the testimonial nature of the work, rights to performance are only given if the actors performing are actually reading from pieces of paper.
The audience must be aware that the four or five actors are representing a multitude of women and their stories.
Anupam Kher’s Kuch Bhi Ho Sakta Hai uses a different approach. Mid way through the play, you get swept up by the entertaining story and almost forget that it is an autobiographical performance.
Salim Arif’s Kharaashein – Scars from the Riots about the communal tension in India is a wonderful collage of gritty stories, staged very effectively.
Just like in The Vagina Monologues the actors are merely custodians of someone else’s stories.
But plays with delicate personal subject matter like An Instinct for Kindness are much harder to present honestly. Which is the challenge facing Yael Farber.
The South African director arrived in India a week ago to begin work on Nirbhaya — a testimonial piece about violence against women, inspired by the horrific gangrape and murder of a student on December 16, 2012. Oftentimes cynics gripe about how protests don’t achieve very much and are merely an expression of discontent rather than a solution to the problem. Nirbhaya is proof of the opposite.
It was not the event, but the protests that got Yael Farber and producer/actress Poorna Jagannathan thinking about doing something. And artists can only do what they do best – create art.
The text of the show will comprise mainly of stories from the actors’ own lives. It promises to be a delicate and sensitive piece, but one that will require immense courage and strength from the seven performers if they are to bare their souls to an audience of strangers night after night.
However the bigger challenge will be for Yael, who will have to make each of the stories her own before being able to write them out as a play.
Telling one story is hard enough, but telling six? That requires insides of steel.