Art offers human experiences that raise empathy levels: Mahesh Dattani

New Delhi: Communal tension, same-sex love, child abuse, and patriarchy — even as playwright Mahesh Dattani’s plays portray everyday tragedies, his characters never cease to be human. They are seldom in the extreme, preferring to tiptoe somewhere in between. Perhaps that’s what makes them so easily relatable. And maybe that’s why theatergoers eagerly await his productions.

As Dattani gets set to stage his latest play ‘Snapshots of a Fervid Sunrise’ at NCPA, Tata Garden in Mumbai on February 22, he opines that any theatre is limited by the scope of its language and the term ‘elitist’ has done a great disservice to English language theatre.

“Let us not forget that there are eighty million English speaking Indians and that certainly is not a small number. If at all we have to define the region of Indian English, I would use the word ‘urban’ and not ‘elitist’. Elitism has existed in the country for thousands of years,” he asserts.

His new play is about two lesser-known revolutionaries, Khudiram Bose and Thillayadi Valliammai, both teenagers who sacrificed their lives for a free and just government. The idea came about when Dushyanth Gunashekar, a theatre-maker in Chennai approached him five years ago to write a play for his group. (IANS)

“He had a germ of an idea of doing a solo piece. I did some research and thought it might be a good idea to have Bose and Valliammai stories told back to back. The result was this play. These are young lives and I have focused on the dawn of the revolution, hence the title. There were many such sunrises that perhaps we missed experiencing or acknowledging,” says Dattani, who has to his credit critically acclaimed plays like ‘Final Solutions’, ‘Bravely Fought the Queen’, ‘Thirty Days in September’, ‘The Big Fat City’ and ‘The Murder That Never Was’.

The first playwright in English to be awarded the Sahitya Akademi award, Dattani, who recently revived his Bangalore-based theatre group Playpen and along with Brinda Shankar started its Mumbai chapter has lately been busy mentoring new playwrights.

While we talk about very few young playwrights in the country, he insists that writing for performance is a very special craft and requires an understanding of the theatre as much as that of writing for the page. (IANS)

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