A few hours after you read this, I will be opening Mind Walking in Bombay. The play has been my life for the last few weeks (as is testament from my column), and last week Kavita Nagpal even reviewed it for this page.
For the first time in my short career I find myself in a very odd position. Normally we open shows in front of our home audiences and then tour it around to other cities and festivals. This is the first time that I have worked on a show outside the country and am now opening it for my home base. This is the inevitable result of international collaborations. The show has greater significance because it is the final set of shows of a seven-week tour, and more importantly is also set partly in maximum city.
I have always felt that a director is the only member of the audience that is allowed into the rehearsal room. S/he sees and sculpts the work based on what s/he thinks the audience will perceive. However like all human beings, the director also has his or her own socio-political baggage, and therefore guides the work to be palatable for themselves and therefore for like-minded audiences. So if I am directing a piece of work, I direct it based on who I am, not who the audience is. So perhaps an audience in Bombay would find greater appreciation of it than let’s say Helsinki. At least that’s the theory.
The theory was tested in 2005 when I worked with another Scottish director Toby Gough on a show called Merchants of Bollywood. While we rehearsed the show in India, we opened in Australia. I didn’t think it would do very well at all. But on opening night, I peeked through the set at the curtain call to see one thousand eight hundred Australians dancing in the aisles. I was thunderstruck. The show is still running and has completed over 1,000 performances at venues across the globe in spite of never playing in India. Maybe it is not designed for Indian sensibilities, since most of the audiences it has played to are Caucasian… just like the director.
The same theory might be applied to the astounding critical success of Tim Supple’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the UK, Italy, Australia, Canada and the USA. Although in multiple languages, most of which Tim didn’t understand, the show was still incredibly well received by international audiences. Maybe Tim’s “monolingualism” allowed him to present the play in a way that audiences would be able to decode the story.
When Mind Walking was in Bengaluru, I was quizzed whether anything was changed from the show for the India tour. And the truth is, not one single thing. Director John Binnie, who is Scottish, works on an emotional level. He believes any story can be universal if it is human. The talk back sessions with the Bengaluru audience seemed to support this. But then again, there aren’t many Parsis in Bengaluru. Bombay is Parsi heartland and there is the question of how will people react to a show directed by a Scot, played by a primarily British cast, with a Goan Welshman in the lead.
The only the sane answer to that question is — do the show… let the audience make of it what it can; because if you start tailoring the work to cater for a specific audience, then that’s where art dies, and commercialism takes over.