Undaunted: A reflective essay on dramaturgy

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.

 The play adopts a discursive approach in two ways. It is discursive in an etymological sense, in that it moves from subject to subject, to evoke a dense and complex set of interconnections. It is also discursive in a philosophical sense, in that it pulls together a variety of “truth-claims” across a wide mix of subject matter. The narrative sits across historical fact and cinematic representation, it evokes period objects and events, and it allows elite and popular material to co-exist.

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