Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Short Sweet Theatre

T20 of Theatre is Here!

In times when almost everything needs to be short and fast in order to be popular, be it communicating through the 140-character-limit format of Twitter or the 20-over game of T20, there’s a new industry raring to catch-up with the times. Theatre underwent a makeover recently, thanks to Short+Sweet Theatre, which took place in the capital from 11th November to 19th November. Every night audiences were presented with a buffet of some ten plays of ten minutes each, on themes that tackled issues like that of the displacement of Kashmiri Pandits to quirky tales about a Rottweiler’s misadventures, by a mix of theatre artists: from the renowned Arvind Gaur to relatively newer talent.

While the first edition of Short+ Sweet Delhi was probably most Delhites’ first brush with ten-minute theatre, it’s not a new genre. In 1923 Pierre Loving published 10 Minute Plays, which featured works by notable authors like Arthur Schnitzler and Ferenc Molnar. It was only in 1977 though, after Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays, that 10-minute-plays came to be taken as a veritable format of theatre. But does the time limit force the playwright to compromise on the script in anyway? “I don’t think time is a determinant in how powerful a piece can be. There can be a play of three minutes and it can be immensely powerful,” says Lushin Dubey, who has directed, acted and scripted theatre productions for over 20 years. “Some 10 minute plays are as moving and profound as longer works. For example in Short + Sweet Delhi, we have a play called Perfect Stillness, by an Australian playwright Jane Miller, and it’s about a woman who has passed away and her husband is trying to write a eulogy for her. And she comes back from the grave to correct it. It’s a sad, beautiful and romantic, which only takes 10 minutes, but is as profound and moving as a longer play,” says Alex Broun, Festival Director, Short+Sweet Theatre.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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