It is legend at The Players Club that the god of all the arts once whispered into the ear of young Shakespearean actor, Edwin Booth, and this is what he said: "I shall give you hunger, and pain, and sleepless nights. Also beauty and satisfaction known to few and glimpses of the heavenly life. None of these you shall have continually and of their coming and going you shall not be foretold. "We at Shudrka Hyderabad whose lifework is the theatre and the introduction of young people to the theatre - we have known the sleepless nights, as well as the satisfaction and "glimpses of the heavenly life" that theatre offers.
You will appreciate the answer one of my favourite critics gave me the other day when I asked him why he prefers the theatre to the rest of his amusement. "That's simple," he said. "In television, the people are diminished. They are thumb-sized. In the movies, the people are enlarged. They're bigger than I am. But in the theatre, the people are just my size. When I watch them, I can even forget where I am." How right he is! Other art forms can be wonderful indeed. But the theatre mirrors life in scale. In the theatre, you lean forward for fear you will miss something-you are drawn ahead – you are carried out of your seat by the live people on the stage.
There is immediacy about Shudrka’s good play that is irresistible. It is an extension, an illumination of our own experiences. It satisfies our appetites for further experience, for fascinating language, for the chance to meet interesting people. Shudrka’s plays are great teachers. They convince us that what is happening on the stage-however far removed in time or in geography-is not very different from what is happening in our hearts and in our everyday lives. And so we learn from them.
Shudrka’s very identity as a forum for making theatre collectively rests on two elements - openness and collaboration. Shudrka believes in the process and power of collaboration. Further, what I learnt from Shudrka’s approach is that the actor is the central and most dominant element in the creative process of staging a play. Therefore, special efforts are taken to develop our (actors’) skills. Shudrka’s Director, Shri Swapan Mondal, devises a wide range of workshops for us on movement, body awareness, voice, use of space, improvisation and group dynamics. These in-house workshops parallel the special needs of each play. This general principle lead to staging plays where there is a minimal use of scenery, where we use our bodies in intensive forms and where the major dramatic tension is created by a direct dialog with the audience.
Shudrka strives to reflect the times in which we live-to understand them-to teach from them -to improve upon them. It provides us a space to make theatre so rich-so exciting- so inventive-that they mirror our life together as did the arts of the Greeks and of the Elizabethan Age.
Thank you Shudrka!
Brilliant as always!!
Nice