The Hindu Business Line : <I>Theatre in the corporate world </I>

This week Chennai celebrates once more The Hindu Metro Plus festival, now with participants even from far away Singapore. The festival, organised tastefully and on a considerable scale, also has incentives for the young aspirants through workshops. It is the only English theatre festival of its kind in the country.

A colonial legacy

There was a time when English amateur theatre was a peculiarly urban, upper-class affair with the same sort of people occupying the seats as well as the stage and backrooms. An obvious colonial legacy, it was caricatured as boxwallah theatre because many actors and directors were from the mercantile houses as they were called, and their convent-school progeny. This too, like much else, went through a decline and, fortunately a revival too, with wider appeal of the English language and appreciation of its commercial value — and emergence of Indian playwrights in English, such as Girish Karnad, Vijay Tendulkar, and Badal Sircar.

Drama, tool for communication

Far from being limited to bedroom farces, Shakespeare and the annual pantomime led by the expatriate enthusiast, by the 1990s, plays were far more democratic in their appeal and content. Today, there is a larger population both watching and acting in plays; and the Indian as well as folk theatre traditions are not left behind. More than anything else, such endeavours today need corporate support in money and time. The reasons are many.

One is the extraordinary inflation in the cost of putting on plays in recent times. Second, while actors can afford to give time for virtually nothing at all, at least in English theatre, quality theatre in Tamil and other regional languages need considerable financial strength. Lastly, organisations themselves can use the medium of drama as corporate communication and an instrument for people development.

Many enterprising trainers have shown that theatre is a great way to develop one's wider sympathies, empathy for the unfamiliar and project oneself into strange situations. All these are necessary executive skills. Employees, who constantly face an uncertain and changing world and market place, can grow in confidence by play-acting in an unthreatening and risk-free environment, if guided by a capable facilitator. The public theatre can add to this as well and by helping such a movement to grow and flourish, the corporate world would only be helping itself.

Creative self-discovery

Above all, amateur theatre (as distinct from its professional counterpart) is meant to be mentally relaxing, while at the same time helping one in a process of creative self-discovery. Ask anyone who has made a tentative and doubtful debut into this world and you will find that he or she swears by its remarkable ability to hold a mirror up to one's own life and personality.

Such learning and maturing would be a significant, non-competitive and fun way to encourage the personal growth of people, in which lie all our hopes as organisations. It is only fitting that in this ebullient phase of general good feeling and optimism that we have entered into in recent months, the non-commercial aspects of life too get their share — books, music, plays, dance and many other arts and, of course, the artistes. After all, it costs a fraction of what cricket or football would, and leaves a lasting and widely shared benefit.

(Feedback may be sent to sr.chander@gmail.com)

S. Ramachander

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