Another year of the Prithvi theatre festival brings all of India to the stage. Six decades ago, when Zohra Sehgal asked Prithviraj Kapoor why his traveling theatre company was called Prithvi Theatres, in the plural, he explained that his dream was to have a theatre in every town in India. Today that dream may remain unfulfilled, but Prithviraj's vision has taken shape in a different way – in the form of the Prithvi Theatre in the suburban Bombay neighbourhood of Juhu. Here, the gates are never closed, and in fact there are no gates to close.
The Prithvi Theatre, set up in 1978 by Shashi Kapoor and Jennifer Kendall, hosts over 400 performances by over 50 groups throughout the year, providing them with complete professional and technical facilities. The policies of this intimate 200-seat playhouse – its scaled leasing practices and reasonable ticket pricing – have long offered great support to Bombay theatre. In all, around 65,000 viewers come to see plays at Prithvi every year, and not just for the celebrated Irish coffees at the theatre's café. hree and a half years before Independence, Prithviraj had started a professional theatre company with the motto Kala desh ki seva mein, "Art in the service of the nation". With 2006 being Prithviraj's birth centenary, this year the annual Prithvi Festival adopted Prithviraj's motto for its theme.
For three weeks in November, the festival brought together 28 productions and 45 shows, as well as free platform performances in the Prithvi courtyard and discussion sessions with playwrights. Spread over four venues – the buzzing Prithvi stage itself, the magical Horniman Circle Garden at the other end of the city, the amphitheatre at Land's End in Bandra and the Yashwant Natya Mandir at Matunga-Dadar – the festival kept the spirit of theatre burning bright in Bombay. But Kala desh ki seva mein is a difficult motto to work with in 2006. What do these words mean for us today? "60 years down the line," wonder organisers Sanjna Kapoor and Sameera Iyengar in the festival bulletin, "what role do theatre artists and their art play? What role do we want to play, as theatrewallahs, as citizens of this country?"
Tamasha
Some answers were provided in the choice of productions hosted during the festival. Take the Arpana theatre company's "Cotton 56, Polyester 84", a play written by Ramu Ramanathan, translated by Chetan Datar and directed by Sunil Shanbag. This rich and textured story set in Girangaon, Bombay's textile-mill district, pays tribute to the labour of the mill workers. The festival bulletin quotes Parvatibai Mahadik, the widow of such a worker, in conversation with Hridaynath Jadhav, who plays a mill worker in the production: "My husband worked for 13 years before the mill closed down. He would come home with vegetables or fish, just like Bhau Rao in the play. I would also examine his dabba to see if he had eaten everything.