Mahesh Dattani addresses engineering students at Jaipur Literature Festival

Mahesh Dattani, the first playwright in English, to be awarded with the prestigious Sahitya Akademi award, addressed the students on January 18, 2014. He was addressing his speech at Jaipur Literature Festival.

Emphasizing on theatre, the Morning Raga director discussed the need to focus on content and originality.

The playwright, stage director and occasional film maker encouraged the engineers to present their hobbies along with the technical skills soundly.

On his speech playwright and stage director Mahesh Dattani denied that theatre was dead and said the medium of stage drama had instead cemented its own place in the contemporary era of visually rich cinema.

He said cinema, which exerts a powerful control on audience, is a brilliant medium of artistic expression but theatre continues to hold its place.

Mahesh Dattani, who is also a screen writer and filmmaker, agreed that theatre is likely to be influenced by cinema.

“I do not think that theatre competes with cinema that is completely a different medium. You go to cinema for a reason and you go to a theatre for another reason. All audiences today that go to theatre also go to cinema but the reverse is not true,” he said.

“So in that sense, theatre is likely to be influenced by cinema,” he said, while pointing out that theatre has lots of benefits.
Mr. Dattani participated in the session “I, Me and My Plays”, which talked about scripts, screenplays and the transformative power of theatre.

When queried by Festival Producer Sanjoy Roy, with whom he was in conversation, Mr. Dattani said he found the medium of theatre to be not economically sustainable.

Manu Das who translated Mr. Dattani’s book “Dance like a Man” into Odiya, said that Indian readers were now more familiar with English.
A five minute clip of the play was also shown during the session.

Source: Shipra Joshi, click4college Specialist

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