Use and Need of Obscenity and Cultural ethos defining the change

Disclaimer: I wrote a series of articles for an online magazine called Cheers between 2004-2006, am putting them out here since I found them in Lockdown 2.0

Use and Need of Obscenity and Cultural ethos defining the change

‎20 ‎April ‎2004, ‏‎10:53:58

The play's promotional campaign reads, "Persons below 18 years will not be admitted".  It opens to a bunch of curious audience who get to see audiovisual images, which they are used to seeing on TV or in Movies.  Nevertheless, they are disturbed and could not believe their eyes and ears.  This is common with plays, which are purely for adults.  

But this is true with most of the plays, which are being staged worldwide.  There has been a separate category created for such kind of plays called In-Your-Face Theatre.  There are many exponents for this play and this started as a parallel theatre culture to converse with the audience in more realistic and hard-hitting way.

We could trace the history of this not very far back with avant-garde theatre.  This French word was a movement held prominence in the modern period, a period that could be loosely described as the late 20th century. Furthermore, the term, Avant-garde is a military metaphor, which literally means, advance-guard. It can be interpreted in a revolutionary sense too, that is against an overpowering state. More specifically, the avant-garde movement consisted of a small amount of artist in its embryonic state, and most often represented themselves as being alienated from the established order because they challenged the norms and values held by that established order then.  From there to the modern times it has changed a lot and been accused as a marketing tool to sell or to achieve success of a production.

The international trendsetter Michael John Garces can turn day today events like A TV turns to static, A young girl lies motionless on a bed, A man in a suit enters a dark kitchen, loosens his tie, and opens a refrigerator, to become suspenseful and disturbing. His productions at the Juggerknot Theatre Company are widely acclaimed In-Your-Face productions

Recently in Bangalore there was a play "filth" directed by Preetam Kolipillai was staged.  This was also tagged the adult play written by Irvine Welsh and adapted by Harry Gibson.  The books of Welsh and Gibson's adaptations are well known in the world and the productions well acclaimed.  The Gibson play "Trainspotting" even saw 23 different line-ups for the four members on stage crew.  Not only physically demanding for the artists these plays is hard to digest for any age group audience. 

Gibsons previous production Nightmares was a grand success, and he was commenting on his next production Trainspotting around the country and said in one of his online interviews "It's filthy expensive because it's an epic panto from hell. I might do a small version of it in which a small group of naked people savage each other in a cage. I'm completely serious about that. I'm very into sensationalism, I'm a shocking sensationalist."  With such quotes the production has already has achieved the necessary publicity ensuring its success.  I just hope this is not continued here in India.

Preetam fells that these productions are grittier than the usual theatre.  This represents the logical movement of changed time.  Talking about "filth", he added that the harsh realities, which get the usual reaction of what the hell 'or' this is not theatre, are the typical urban middle class phenomenon.  He added that he would have loved to Indianise the script but with so much extra involvement with the script there were instance where there could not have been absolute equivalence to Indian scene.

Strangely enough, Preetam did not get a single bad remark for his play.  Strangely enough, the comments were restricted to "good execution, disturbing".  One good development observed is the wide spread acceptance by the younger generation.

Talking about this trend of adult's only play Ranjon Ghoshal had a different opinion.  If it's a tool used to market or sell the play well its not good for the theatre culture.  But if it's a scripts necessary then he doesn't have any objections.  He also mentioned Bengali theatre where such explicit performances are scripts necessity and used moderately.  He added, "people still go and watch positive theatre and I wouldn't do such explicit theatre myself".

Prakash Babu noted cartoonist and theatre activist sharing Ranjon's idea of the need of explicative performance should be script based.  But he added that the productions which are being staged recently have all been text based.  Unless the visual based theatre makes a huge comeback then its difficult to keep all ages of audiences entertained and inside the theatre.  He added "If script supports nudity its welcome, like the 50 year old nude woman in a Kanhyalal production which was staged in Akka festival in Mysore was never obscene or offending or even disturbing".

These conversations are never ending and they are typical of any production.  Again a fight between two schools of thoughts one supporting the idea and one against.  The best way to define the need is the audience.  If theatre is being promoted in any way whether by hook or crook I support the idea and stand by the same.  End of the day people should be driven into theatres like the way it was many years back.