Old Playground for the New

The Shakuntala Project being staged at Black Box Okhla Debjit Banerjee

A garment factory stood at the end of a road full of other factories. It is now Delhi’s only private black box — an empty space that is equipped with technology but leaves theatre artistes to design their own seating,
scenes and style of plays. Unlike conventional venues, a black box can change with an artiste’s imagination.
“I have spent more than two years looking for alternative spaces to make work in Delhi. This space appealed to me because of its amazing height, which left a lot of room to play. The incidental mezzanine on three sides made for a perfect thrust stage — especially for this show where I wanted the audience to look inside an apartment,” says Nikhil Mehta, who remodelled the factory into a theatre — but retained the building’s original appearance. At the entrance are blackboards that furnish details of “Effluent discharge and treatment”, “Hazardous waste generation” and “Use of hazardous chemicals”. On another wall are a half-dozen fire extinguishers and a small tulsi plant. Surrounded by remnants of the past, the audience gets prepared at the gate to leave their notions behind.

Shows are held late in the evening, when the area in Delhi’s industrial district, Okhla, is quiet. Cars line the dim road as Delhi’s theatre eminences stop by to see the performance space and the new play. Mehta juxtaposes his new-venue-in-an-old-building concept with a new-play-from-an-old-text plotline. He takes up Kalidasa’s classic, Abhijnana Sakuntalam, which has drawn directors from across the spectrum, from Kavalam Narayana Panikkar to Professor Chandradasan (who directed Shakuntalam with second-year students of National School of Drama in Delhi a week before Mehta opened his play).

“How does something new exist without something old?” asks Mehta. The Shakuntala Project revolves around a man and a woman, who have locked themselves in a room, away from the world, and are trying to create a great piece of work. “We need to go back to the basics,” she says. “I am trying to make something new,” he answers, “Kuch bhi bana kar jeeney ka kya fayda hai?” For the woman, Raja Ravi Varma’s painting of Shakuntala is an inspiration. For the man, it is a hindrance. “We can’t do anything more because we have seen this,” he shudders. “This shows where we should go,” she replies.

Mehta’s play does not follow the script of Abhijnana Sakuntalam but evokes its ideas through different desires of man and woman. “Shakuntala and Dushyant have to fall in love,” says the woman. “Ok fine. Pyar ho gaya. Naya kya hai?” answers the man.

From the latest lights to compartments in the wall, to giant screens that magnify the anxiety of the actors, The Shakuntala Project showcased the possibilities of Black Box Okhla. Audiences sit in an upper gallery and look down at the performance space voyeuristically from three sides. “The next performance will be in a completely different setting,” promises Mehta.

A space free of boundaries, definitions or guidelines can expose the limitations of the performers. Actors may find themselves competing with state-of-the-art technology, and falling short. Not so with The Shakuntala Project. Mehta, who spent summer as Assistant Director for Sunday in the Park with George on Broadway, created a synergy between the performances, stagecraft and content. Prashant Prakash, who has worked with The Company Theatre in Mumbai and was selected in a list of “30 under 30” by Forbes last year, brings an unbridled energy to his role. Sharvari Deshpande, who performed in Monsoon Wedding, the musical by the Berkeley Repertory Theatre earlier this year, plays the woman teetering to and from the edge, keen to make her point and, yet, balance the man’s ideas.
“Experiencing stories in an environment is what makes theatre, theatre – even in proscenium settings. Black Box Okhla was founded to reclaim the environment as an active, forceful entity in the stories we tell on stage,” says Mehta. He adds, “The culture of weekend-only runs, for obvious budgetary reasons, has brutally killed the importance of scenic design, lighting design and other tech elements. We need a seismic shift in how we think about theatre in India to revive its power. The space must be integrated into storytelling at the same time as the actors. No show should run for less than a month.”