In Search of Indian Theatre

Extract

A national theatre is a representative, specific, and unique image of a community's ethos, and is created through the living idiom, the distinctive tone, and the particular form that a community evolves in its process of living. Whatever is dead, irrelevant or alien cannot be an attribute of a living national theatre. A vigorous theatre is always rooted in patterns of public behaviour. The moment an experience is severed from these patterns of public conduct, at that moment we knock out the dramatic tensions, and the generative action which define the quality of a theatre. The theatre, as an art, emerges out of vital social contexts and miraculously images a community's awareness, its identity, its potentials, and its particularity. If a theatre does not draw its nourishment from the detailed facts of life it remains a toneless and anaemic exercise.