The essence of Ibsen

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It’s nine in the evening and Amita Rana is still busy at the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus putting together the closing act of her upcoming play. It seems like a stretched date with Henrik Ibsen, she says, underlining the hours and research gone into knowing the Norwegian poet and playwright.

“The play is an adaptation of his play The Lady From The Sea, with the sea as a metaphor to look into the complexities of the characters. I had never studied him in college, and the play seems to be a sort of an introduction. Maintaining most of his flair, we have experimented with sound/music and metaphors,” says the student of The School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU.
A few kilometres away, Shubham Bhatia seems to be running late in getting his act together. “The League of Youth transposes Ibsen’s small-town Norway onto a village in Uttar Pradesh, where an ambitious young man pushes his political agenda with a new party,” he says adding, “for days we have travelled to the hamlets of UP and picked up local inputs. Now we have so much to put together, but it’s going great.”
With the return of the University Ibsen Festival to Delhi colleges after 2010, the moment is to live and act Ibsen. The theatre festival, scheduled from September 19 to 23 at the LTG auditorium, has plays from four Delhi University colleges — Lady Shri Ram College for Women, Ramjas College, Maitreyi College and St. Stephen’s College, besides one from JNU. The students are working on Ibsen’s iconic plays, Hedda Gabler, The Lady from the Sea, Burn and An Enemy of the People, conceived around fusion and Indiani-sation. The fest will see drama bringing together universities, continents and centuries.
“Besides doing Ibsen for the first time, it is also the first time when we have no play director and competition with other plays. We got some good tips from senior drama students from JNU on documenting the play,” says Yama Seth, president, Dramatics Society, LSR College on her play Burn.
Seth’s team is working on an adaptation from the plays Hedda Gabler by Ibsen and Look Back In Anger by John Osborne. “Both the plays have parallel emotions and structure of relationships. What makes it interesting is our treatment,” she says.
For Nissar Allana, director, Dramatic Art and Design Academy (DADA), the organiser of the festival and the Delhi Ibsen Festival in November hosting pan-Indian participation, the moment is the harbinger of a theatre revolution. “We have a long-term plan for Indian theatre, and Ibsen and colleges are part of it. Ibsen was responsible for bringing realism to the Indian proscenium in the 1920s and 30s. There’s a lot of reading on him now with these plays,” he says. The student teams have been financially supported by DADA, with each given `75,000, lights, a professional platform and publicity.
“We are letting them interact amongst themselves and take help from us. Looking at the hard work going into their plays, we are sure the productions will run beyond the festival,” he says.