Stage Buzz: Theatre: Drive: Roads, Traffic and Those In-between: Sonal Parmar

Recently the final year students of the National School of Drama presented a performance called Drive, conceptualized by Denis Maillefer and directed by him and Amitesh Grover.

As part of their preparation for this production, the students went to the streets of the city where they were to find partners - an auto rickshaw driver for the boys and a traffic policewoman for the girls. The idea was for the students to then talk to their partners, get to know them, about them and their personal and professional lives. What emerged as a result of these interactions and conversations were the oft not-known or not-acknowledged elements of the partners’ lives – the practical limitations and considerations of their day to day existence, as well as their personal and often private dreams, regrets, desires and philosophies.

Based on their interactions students were then asked to create a stage character drawn from the real person. The character could be based on anything – a particular detail, general conversations, a perception, or insight. It was not to be a replication, a reproduction of an image, but rather, something that went beyond the mere imitation, something that captured an insight, a shade of being that had left an impression on each student. As the director said, “The character had to be specific, clear; s/he had to have a goal, a desire, a secret, a weakness, something that broke him/her or made him/her exist on stage.”

Once this was done, students then had to collaborate with design students, who had already been a part of the process from the beginning, and build individual boxes on stage, each of which contained a single actor and told an independent story. What emerged was a series of compartments, each containing a person, each portraying a certain reality as perceived and then performed by the actors.

The stories of the auto rickshaw drivers revealed unique narratives – the man from a small town destined to be just an auto wallah; the daring optimist, confident that he will take his wife for a holiday to Switzerland; the solitary figure lost in pornography as possible escape or projection; the man delving into his subconscious for sustenance or inspiration to carry on in a hard reality. These were men talking about domesticity, fatherhood, society, family, violence, emotional and sexual frustration, hope and despair. The scripts were diverse and what strikes one is how different elements make an impact of different people. Drawn by convincing performances, the range of human perception makes its presence felt in no uncertain terms.

What struck me most however, were the portrayals of the traffic policewomen. The singular common factor that emerged in each performance was that of their sense of gender - each character seemed almost entirely focused on doing something or the other to enhance her sense of the feminin0ity. It made me wonder – how does a woman deal with her sexuality in a profession predicated on the masculine, on aggression. What does it feel like to work in a field where any glimpse of softness or femininity could immediate make one vulnerable to unwanted attention and who knows how many other complications? Where man-like qualities were not only encouraged but were in fact the standard believed to ensure efficiency and effectiveness. In such a professional space how do women cope? How do they protect the sexual, sensual, feminine essence of themselves?

The young female actors of the School did a remarkable job portraying this angst. The young woman rubbing herself raw with haldi and besan (the traditional fairness uptan) after standing all day in the strong sun of the Delhi summer, trying desperately though unsuccessfully to undo some of her tan, in a society driven by fairness as prime standard of feminine beauty. The woman stuffing her bra in the privacy of her bedroom, to appear more voluptuous, or perhaps to convince herself that she could still appear voluptuous, could still be attractive and sexy and desirable to men. The women changing from their uniforms to saris to uniforms once again in a constant alteration of identity as they fluctuated between the people they were and the personas they were forced to inhabit in their professional spaces. In a world where the body exists as a site of power; where it can be used for affirmation or rejection; where sexuality is recognized as a force influencing, colouring and controlling so much of human behavior, how does one negotiate its negation on a daily basis. These were just some of the questions raised by production.

The aim of Drive was perhaps to allow a glimpse into a reality that we come across everyday but barely resister in our self-absorbed consciousness. And if so, the production succeeded. In the creations and portrayals of the charecters whose stories they performed the young actors and actresses of NSD presented to the audience slices of the deceptively unobvious realities of men and women gracing our roads and enabling us to negotiate the distances and chaos on them. Considering this play is a part of the students’ training process, one hopes the experience of getting to know real people and drawing scripts based on them - yet not them – leaves them with lessons in and an appreciation of the precariousness of creativity that says something worthwhile while respecting the dignity of those it draws inspiration from. The performances were as believable as the contexts they came from; the narratives as compelling as the dynamics of human existence; and the stories themselves as reflective of the human experience as the emotions and conflicts they sought to echo.