Litfest: Writers rule!

Normal festival performance curation tends to place great emphasis on the shows and makers of the plays. However, not when it’s a literary festival; then the writer is the king or the queen. That’s perhaps why when programming for Tata Literature Live! The Mumbai International Litfest the tendency is to have so many writer-performers.

This year, we have two very different one-person shows. Going Viral is a play about the spread of a disease. A beautiful tale told with consummate ease by UK theatre-maker Daniel Bye whose The Price of Everything was very well received three years ago. This one is like a role-play experience where telling of the narrative triggers your imagination and you find yourself believing you are in Uganda or the Philippines.

Poetic License, written and performed by Canadian Erika Batdorf; is more conventiaonl in its narrative and talks about a creative writing professor who is coming to terms with her sister's illness. The play is replete with literary quotations and references to great poets. It is an uplifting story about resilience, even if at times discomfiting.

Another writer-performer at the festival is Vidya Shah. Based on her non-fiction book Jalsa, her show Women on Record, uses multimedia and her own beautiful singing voice to transport us back to the early age of the gramophone era; when lady singers became the pioneers of recorded music in India.

Two other one-performer shows make their appearance, and even though the writer is not on stage, he does seem to steal the limelight. These are White Rabbit Red Rabbit and Blank by Nassim Suleimanpour, which will be performed by Anurag Kashyap and Raghu Karnad respectively. Nassim’s style of writing demands that the actor have no pre-knowledge of the text, and must discover it while he reads it out aloud to an audience for the first (and last) time. Blank, appears designed for a festival such as this.

The text is filled with holes. The audience fills these holes and each night, a brand new story is told. White Rabbit has had an extended run in Mumbai, and the festival will premiere the first-ever Hindi production. Both are remarkable additions to the playwriting vocabulary. Nassim calls his style ‘Machine Plays’ because they are not simply story-telling devices but create some other consequence.

Another translation at the festival is Polyphony, where poets have translated each other’s works and perform them. Interpretation of the written word is represented by a Tribute to Roald Dahl whose birth centenary it is. To me Roald Dahl was a writer who created fantastical worlds like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory and the BFG. But in fact a large part of his canon was as dark as it was funny. This is the aspect of his work that they show pays homage to.

There’s also Riding Madly of in No Direction by his theatre highness, Naseeruddin Shah, based on the unconnected writings of little known Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock.

What seems like a departure from the literary theme is the presence of Mada’s Marvels Featuring Cardistry, by Adam Mada, in the line-up. That is, until you realise that the sleight of hand show is a tribute to the connection between Australian and Indian magicians. Australian author John Zubrzycki is working on a new book on this subject, and is also doing a straight talk at the festival. Therefore, it makes sense to feature this exciting collective of Australian magicians.

There are other theatre highlights at the festival. A panel discussion on the new way of writing plays for a live audience, workshops on writing radio plays, a debate on Shakespeare and whether his words are better than his plots, and even the presentation of Theatre Group’s Sultan Padamsee Award for playwriting. More information is available on www.tatalitlive.in.

Yet, with so much theatre and performance, the most dramatic impact almost always is made by the writers. Shobhaa De was stunning in the debate last year. Scot Carney made our insides turn with his presentation on the bone trade in India. Mahesh Elkunchwar was insightful when he talked about his writing process. Each year, the festival seems to find new ways to become more and more dramatic, and not all of it has to do with the performances.