The creation of art in times of global turmoil is not a luxury, but a necessity. Even as we must pause to fathom the tremendous loss of life and social turmoil caused by the Covid19 pandemic in India and the world, as artists we must be aware of the role we must play as the period of lockdown ends. When we emerge on “the other side”, we might find a world drastically transformed. Artists and art will be needed to mediate forces that will try to constitute the new normal, even as we experience an alarming retreat from democratic norms in the present crisis.
The playwright Howard Barker
offers us a compelling metaphor of his conception of the theatre - the theatre of
catastrophe. This construction “…takes as its first principle the idea that
art is not digestible. Rather, it is an irritant in consciousness, like the
grain of sand in the oyster's gut...” While Barker’s invocation of
catastrophe is to jolt the complacent audience with a feeling of sensorial
excess and contextual disjuncture, at present we find ourselves in a literal
catastrophe. As a playwright continuing to work in these difficult
circumstances, I share this, and additional ideas on how the play Undaunted
has taken shape.
One of the stated aims of this
play is to render on stage a kind of worker’s consciousness. The lascar
as an Indian seafarer may be socially constructed through biography and
historical record. However, the play seeks to evoke the lascar, not as an
individual produced by social forces, but instead the beacon holder of a
particular shared worldview. This is one marked by mobility, the ability to
move from port to port, to be exposed to new ideas and cultures and to land up
at unusual and remarkable places. At the same time there is also a sense of
constraint, where the ability to disembark or “jump ship” was regulated and
racial prejudice was deployed as a means of control.
In this play the attempt to
capture consciousness has resulted in a mix of registers, using dreams,
memories, contemporary memes and historical fact as source material. The wide range
of registers is deliberate, as it confounds the easy relegation of the subject
as a distant matter for historical contemplation, or one relevant to high or
low culture. As agents of early globalisation, the lascar’s world is brought to
the foreground and scenes of migration and travel under extreme duress resonate
with contemporary images of migrant labour “cut loose” by the government to
fend for themselves.
One of the formal choices of the
play has been to adopt a closed space, open time format. This is a
rubric that creates a relatively bounded space, the deck of a ship, as the main
setting. The closed space has different configurations, such as an upper deck
and a lower deck, typically indicating class differences of passengers. The
setting in time however, remains open, with the play alternating between the
present and the past. Although we are locked into a single physical space, the
action of the play flits across time, roughly covering the first half of the
twentieth century.
This play mixes genres. I
do not want the play to be seen as a historical play or a period piece. The
events, though they occur in the past are conflated with the present. This is
meant to reflect the contemporary moment, as one aspect of the public narrative
around Covid19 is the uncanny re-articulation of earlier historical periods.
The most obvious parallel is the Spanish flu of 1918, but the referencing to
World War I and II by political leaders across the world is also marked, as is
evocation of the great economic depression of the 1930s. The time signatures present
in the play mimics the present as a meta-narrative for a regressive slide into
the past.
For example, the play switches
into narratives derived from popular cinema at the time, across Hollywood and
Bollywood. Based on researched historical fact, we are taken behind the scenes
of the 40s film-noir murder mystery Calcutta shot at Paramount studios,
where about 200 lascars worked as extras on location. We also are taken on
board the SS Rajputana which is actually a film-set for the idealistic classic
Dr. Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani directed by V Shantaram at the Rajkamal Kalamandir
Studios in Bombay. Similarly, we are also witness to legendary maritime journeys
of Indian political figures such as Ambedkar, Gandhi & Savarkar at pivotal
moments in their lives, prior to their emergence as major figures in the Indian
independence movement. We also experience a legendary maritime journey based on
historical fact, the story of the SS Komagata Maru which was denied permission
to dock at Vancouver in 1914.
Lastly, the play is a journey
over water for the characters and audience. This is an ethereal metaphor
evocative of spiritual growth, the movement from one phase of life to the next,
or even the movement beyond this life to the next. One origin for this metaphor
comes to us from Greek myth where the boatman Charon ferries recent dead across
the river Styx and Acheron in the afterlife. In the play the characters all
experience this journey in different ways.
I am keenly aware that this play
was written at a moment of terrible loss. I believe that the heart of the play,
as evoked in the spirit of the lascars, is the journey of hope. Despite the
terror of the unknown, we journey forward. Despite our plans dashed, our vision
obscured, and the unbearable weight of grief, we must journey onwards with love
and light in our hearts.
Written 15th May 2020
