Solo Stars

A WOMAN LOCKS US with her gaze and a knowing smile. She seems familiar but is not immediately recognisable. She be­gins to sing, and then she asks us to sing a lullaby with her. Sometimes, through applause, the audience provides her a background score. In her solo, Do you Know this Song, nominated for best play at the ongoing Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards (META), Delhi-based theatre maker Mallika Taneja draws us into her performance with her compel­ling presence that defies mainstream notions of characterisation. This along with collective singing and props, like dolls, kitchen utensils and an old landline phone, re-create a person trying to recapture lost memories. “I don’t find myself approaching the stage through character. I have never been attracted to moving towards a character as some established theatre practices do. Perhaps I just don’t know how to do it. I think I begin with presence. I find people very interesting for who they are and what they bring to their roles as opposed to imposing ‘characteristics’ on them,” the actor says, about her creation, which deals with loss and grief. With her harmo­nium, microphone and objects from the past, Taneja searches for the person and the songs she lost. Along the way, she asks the audience to join her in this search.

At the International Theatre Festival of Kerala (ITFOK), Thrissur, a few years ago, an artist from Hyderabad trans­formed into a besotted Salman Khan fan, making us laugh and also empathise with her loneliness. Bhagyashree Tarke was every inch the frenzied film buff in the play Salma Deewani. Her unabashed love for the star and her conviction engaged the audience completely. We gushed when she blushed over her hero, we felt a pang of pain at her loneliness as a young homemaker. The scene where she danc­es to ‘Oh oh jaane jaana’, from the 1998 Bollywood film Pyaar Kiya to Darna Kya, with a broom for a guitar was both funny and powerful at the same time. The play can be seen as a satire about the challenges of early marriages, loneliness and fandom. The performance brings together absurdity and realism on stage, through imagery, audience interaction, and storytelling.

The National School of Drama alum­nus says of the play she wrote, directed and starred in, “It’s like I am exploring a recipe. The most important ingredient being a sense of humour. I mix up traits of people I have observed and make a new person with my limited knowl­edge while I am also prepared for the final recipe to taste good.”

“There is a very large space now for solo work, because, among other reasons, there is growing lack of resources for larger productions and it is difficult to move them. It is easier to present solo work than ensemble work,” says Mallika Taneja, actor and director

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Welcome to the world of solo theatre where the single actor dons the cap of not only the creator but also all the players on the stage. In the last few years, Indian contemporary theatre has seen the rise of the solo woman theatre maker, like Taneja and Tarke who are both the creators and performers of their shows. Instead of relying on an entire cast, these solo artists reach out to the audience, making the audience a co-actor. These women artists are staging a quiet revolution by reconfig­uring the mechanics of theatre. They have supportive backstage and creative teams, but on-stage they are the solo stars. They are also gently changing the gender and power dynamics of theatre, with creativity and sensitivity.

Savita Rani’s solo Notion(s): In Between You & Me, which was staged at META, 2023, in Delhi, questions notions such as purity, superiority and power in society. How can we move beyond these notions, she asks in her play. Her other solo RIP: Restlessness in Pieces, is about a woman’s need to travel with her husband into the forest. Rani says, “I don’t pay focus on characteri­sation and aesthetic, I pay attention to what I am interested in expressing, and sharing with others. Writing is also that act of sharing. Form is hidden there, and characters too.”

What draws these creators to solos? Rani says she was tired of waiting. “I realised that as a professional actor working in theatre I don’t have much work. Mostly a theatre actor sits idle. I define it as waiting mode. An actor doesn’t know what to do without a director. Everyone does work to make a play but most of the time no further shows happen and an actor then again goes out of work. So, I wanted to work instead of being in waiting mode.”

Women theatre makers are mak­ing their presence felt more keenly because of a combination of various factors ranging from aesthetic to economic to sociological. Most often, they have been assigned roles that are peripheral to the main narrative that usually revolves around a man. “There are certain roles that we are instantly boxed into. It’s mostly because his­torically the writers have been men,” says Taneja who through her perfor­mances, installations and curatorial work explores gender and pleasure, memories and remembering. “Socie­ty’s imagination for women is limited, but our imagination for ourselves is not limited. Why mother? We can be monsters. Why girlfriend? We can be anything at all, which goes beyond the structured roles of society.”

Sustainability is another big factor. Many of the performers feel it’s better to tour with a solo play than an ensemble work. So, we now see more performance-makers who are multi-skilled as actors, writers and directors. Tarke has been urging her fellow theatre makers to embark on the solo endeavour as well. “The only prob­lem is getting a big enough audience for the shows if you’re the only artist. So, I recently threw a writing exercise at two of my girlfriends and guided them into penning 20-minute solo pieces of their own while I did mine, and I then di­rected all three and did a few shows. It’s called With Nothing On.” This becomes an easier way to attract an audience as it includes three different shows.

Solos also lure actors with their potential to present a range of emotions. One such play was Elephant in the Room (produced by Dur Se Brothers) that trav­erses mythology and ecology through the emotional dexterity, precision of movement and nuanced voice work by actor and director Yuki Ellias, who plays multiple characters. She went on to bag the Best Actor (Female) at META in 2017 and has performed it many times since. Ellias, who is trained at the Jacques Lecoq School of Theatre in Paris and is a certified pedagogue from the London International School of Performing Arts, says, “The reason to do Elephant… was because it was com­missioned to be a solo. Running it has been most feasible over so many years because it has a compact crew.”

The solitude can be sometimes tricky but it’s also a creative challenge for the actor-artist, who can play around with their imagination and be original. From minimalism in set design, and focus on movement and body, to non-linear storytelling, solo works can be truly experimental. According to Tarke it is boring some­times to be alone on stage, but she compensates for it by pulling in the audience and interacting with them.

Solos are not a new concept for Indian theatre. From Koodiyattam that has the solo woman performer (Nangiar) to Pandavani (tales of the Mahabharata recounted by a single woman artist), we have had a strong history of solo women performers in our traditional theatre.

Rani, whose PhD thesis is on devised solo theatre in India, says it’s just a recent phenomenon in the modern theatre space where actors are dependent on a director. She says visionaries like Polish theatre director and theorist Jerzy Marian Grotowski never mention the director’s name as the important element in theatre—it’s always actor, text, space and audience.

At a recent discussion circle at ITFOK, several women theatre actors shared their problematic relationships vis-a-vis their directors. There is a growing discontentment among some women actors who are done with the hierarchy that exists within the con­ventional director-centred ensemble plays. Taneja says, “I would not call it ‘male’, but ‘patriarchal’, women direc­tors also have had similar attitudes. It is not an easy position to be in—to be leaders and directors. But, nothing excuses bad behaviour towards your peers… no matter what the difficulty. We expect actors and younger or newer practitioners to be like Ekalavya, cut our thumbs and surrender to a toxic director in power. This is not needed. It does not mean structure or hierarchy cannot exist, or totally should not exist, sometimes it is needed for better func­tioning. But no one needs to turn into an insensitive, power drunk human being,” she says. As a director of ensem­ble works as well, she tries hard to keep it accommodating and collaborative, while discussing payment structure, work hours and so on. “We also have to keep people around you who say, ‘This is not cool,’ and be in some form of self-reflection at all times. I like to have an insistence on the process being pleasurable, with proper lunch breaks and eating together… Why do we have to be bereft of joy? Even when speaking about ugly uncomfortable things. Self-reflection is also needed to ask central questions of your work. As in why should an audience watch the performance we are making?”

“As an actor I have seen how other people have been treated badly and exploited. I became a director to create my own environment, a better way to work,” says Yuki Ellias, actor and director

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Theatre makers must stay account­able to ethical practices, believes Ellias who, as a corporate coach, uses theatre techniques for communication initi­atives for business leaders and teams across several industries. “As an actor I have seen how other people have been treated badly and exploited. I became a director to create my own environment, a better way to work,” she says.

So how can the current power struc­ture in the theatre space be re-imagined in a way the actor’s creative freedom is not compromised? Tarke says freedom comes with responsibility. “It is a 100 per cent symbiotic form of art and only companies or individuals who can be symbiotic are correct in their approach. They are the ones who work with cor­rectness and mutual respect. When you can’t help the situation one can always write a solo of their own and perform.”

Working on a solo is an opportunity for the contemporary theatre performer to let go of the conventional modes of theatre creation and ideas of acting, and explore plays with curiosity and flexibility. It opens new doorways to training, experimenting with fictional and non-fictional worlds, blurring the personal and the political. The lack of a ‘director’ to supervise the work can be daunting. But then many performers are finding innovative ways to get feedback; like falling back on a creative crew who will act as a soundboard or working with mentors and colleagues for creative sup­port. The biggest lure of this medium is the creative autonomy to work in a way that’s comfortable for the actor, so it is no surprise that we are seeing more women theatre artists take to solos.

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Parshathy J Nath