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The Wire
29-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Wire
The Theatre of Ratan Thiyam: Profound Beauty on the Modern Stage
I remember Ratan Thiyam, almost always dressed in black, performing an elaborate curtain call along with his actors at the end of his show. Together they would all go down on their knees and touch their foreheads to the stageboards so as to thank the audience for coming to the performance. The grace of this gesture in some sense encoded the essence of Ratan's theatre work – its formal rigour and its elegance as it walked the fine line between performance and secular ritual for, and of, the modern stage. One the most celebrated theatre makers of India, Ratan Thiyam, who passed on July 23, 2025, in Imphal at the age of 77, was in command of many roles at one and the same time throughout his life. He was a theatre director of brilliance, but was also a writer and a poet, a theatre teacher, a guru, a distinguished organiser and a leader – heading institutions like the National School of Drama as its Director (1987–88) and as its Chairperson (2013–17), while creatively shaping the artistic style of the renowned Chorus Repertory Company that has performed across India and the world to great acclaim for more than four decades. However, let me begin this tribute to Ratan by taking a step sideways. It is said that there is a philosophical connection between landscape artists, horticulturalists and theatre makers. All of them understand the effects of a slant of light, the depth of shadow, grades of colour, chiaroscuro, and the inter-relationships, by placement, between nature, humans and objects. I had the occasion several years ago to visit the Chorus Repertory Company, located at the edges of Imphal city, and I vividly remember the nearly three-acre site: the neatly trimmed hedges, the small pond, the clusters of trees with blossoming vines wrapped around their trunks, the flower beds, the vegetable patch, and the gravelly pathways connecting one part to another. The vegetables harvested from the fields fed everyone who lived on site including Ratan. He lovingly introduced the garden, the water body and the plants, many of which he had planted himself. Also read: Ratan Thiyam, the Risks He Took and the Future of Indian Theatre Working the land was a part of the daily routine set up several decades before the connections between agricultural activity and theatre practice had come into focus, as they have done now. Apart from this there was, and still is, another routine in place – of practising movement, breath, vocalisation, song and music derived from the vocabularies of Manipuri dance traditions, martial arts and ritual practices. This training happened in a cluster of buildings set amidst the landscape, that included an exhibition space, a rehearsal space, and a blackbox theatre equipped with light and sound systems. Away from the noise of the city, the Chorus Repertory as imagined by Ratan functions as a sort of ashram, where skill is transferred to the shishya – student – on a daily and continual basis, a mode of transmission different from the segmented time-tables of 'modern' theatre training institutes. But back to the theatre maker and the horticulturalist, and their understanding of atmosphere – which is objective and subjective, material and non-material, at the same time; something that you can breathe in and recognise it to be joy or peace or melancholy for instance, but not know what it is that you have drawn into your lungs. Ratan's use of light and shadow in theatre is unparalleled. He was able to create degrees of darkness on the stage – experienced as sometimes dense and sometimes diffuse with a precision that requires an exact understanding of the properties of lighting apparatus. At one moment the lights dimmed so low that you might see nothing but the glint of sequins on the potloi (the structured skirt worn by Manipuri dancers) as a group of performers glide across the stage; at another moment you might see a slash of light illuminate fingers wrists and upper arms flickering against the cyclorama – leaves, insects or distress signals from a drowning chorus? From the dark upstage you might see a tall, white fabric umbrella, held firmly by an actor, float downstage, to form a halo ─ marking a passage to the heavens? The tumultuous clang and flash of hand-held gongs deafen and blind the spectators as the chakravyuh gains the velocity of a tornado in a circle of red beams. And who can forget the often-cited image of an elephant materialising on stage as if in a dream, in his memorable production of Agyeya's Uttarapriyadarshi! These are stage effects that cause the heart to pound. Almost nobody understood the magic of the image in theatre better than Ratan Thiyam. And almost nobody used the proscenium arch theatre, also known as the picture-frame stage, better than him. The picture-frame stage, brought to India by the British to house their theatricals, has given rise to much debate. The proscenium, as we know, is the architectural frame that edges the opening of the stage. The major experiential convention it produces is a play of dark and light; the stage being illumined while the audience is in darkness is as much an emotional experience as it is material. What effect does such architectural framing have on traditional forms and their grammars? How does it change our viewing habits and our expectations? Ratan Thiyam's work, performed primarily in the proscenium, disturbs assumptions and generates a contradiction. Even when he remodelled traditional grammars, and reshaped gestures drawn from Manipuri martial arts and dance forms so as to align them with the enclosing edges of the frame, Ratan produced performances that have often been understood as, or even become synonymous with, Indian theatre. A description that we must inflect, gloss and interrogate by keeping his remodelling, his refashioning of form stance and music in mind. Ratan Thiyam's luminous stage work exceeds description; what stays in our memory is his love for the craft of theatre, and the beauty it can produce. It reminds us that meaning-making in theatre is not by word alone but by all the elements that make up the performance – from minutiae such as glinting sequins and flying tassels on costume, to the voluminosity of shadowed tableaus and grand battles choreographed to thunderous percussion that judder the very foundations of the auditorium. Our homage to Ratan Thiyam: the person who ignited the spell of material fiction that is theatre; the one whose aesthetic and pedagogical imagination enhanced the discourse of modern Indian theatre.
New Indian Express
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
Ratan Thiyam: A titan of Indian theatre and the guardian of the North‑East's cultural soul
Ratan Thiyam, who passed away on July 23, was the Bhupen Hazarika of Indian stage. Like the late great cultural icon, Thiyam—a master auteur—mounted his greatest works from the North East—through the Chorus Repertory Theatre based in Manipur at the foothills of the eastern Himalayas. His Theatre offered a sanctuary where actors were also dancers, musicians, painters, and seekers. The physical isolation of Chorus Repertory was deliberate; it allowed a kind of focused artistry rarely possible in settings based in cities. This reflected in the performances his "Theatre of roots" offered. The plays he staged were not spectacles but meditative, immersive experiences rooted in timeless truths. The acclaimed playwright and director's work was rooted in ancient Indian dramatic traditions, especially the Nāṭyaśāstra, as well as in the narrative and visual vocabulary of Meitei performance forms. His use of silence, martial movement, masks, minimal dialogue, and ritual repetition created a distinct style that felt at once ancient and modern. A poet and philosopher too, Thiyam crafted performances that were visual symphonies, where every light cue, every chant, every stillness served the deeper metaphysical structure of the play. He wrote silence into his plays. He drew beauty out of brutality. He choreographed stillness as if it were action. His visual compositions— torches against darkened skies, chorus lines moving like wind through reeds—remain etched in the memories of those who witnessed them. The audience left his plays not excited, but transformed. Thiyam believed theatre must transcend slogans and provoke deeper reflection. His plays never shouted, but they lingered, raising disturbing questions. While some critics accused him of being aloof from contemporary politics, he actually wasn't. When violence erupted in Manipur, he returned his Padma Shri in protest. He was unafraid to speak up against policies and politics that threatened the cultural or human fabric of his region. He frequently called upon civil society and religious leaders to take responsibility for communal peace, especially during the ethnic unrest that plagued Manipur in recent years. For him, cultural diversity was not an abstract principle, but a living reality to be fiercely protected. Great works all Each of Thiyam's productions was a carefully constructed universe, months, sometimes years, in the making. His Chakravyuh (1984), based on the Mahabharata, became a landmark in Indian theatre history. A searing depiction of war, it won the Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Festival and catapulted Manipur onto the world stage. In Andha Yug and Uttar Priyadarshi, he returned to mythic tales of moral collapse and spiritual reckoning. His Ritusamharam, adapted from Kalidasa's poetic celebration of the seasons, turned natural cycles into meditative cycles of rebirth and loss. Nine Hills One Valley explored the fragile coexistence of Manipur's hill and valley communities, and When We Dead Awaken adapted Ibsen into a deeply introspective, eastern idiom. His adaptations of Greek tragedies such as Antigone (Lengshonnei) and The Bacchae were localised into Meitei culture, reimagining Western classics through the philosophical and performative language of Manipur. Even Shakespeare's Macbeth found new resonance in his theatre. From Manipur to Delhi and back His roots in Manipur, where he was born on January 20, 1948 in Imphal, played a huge role in shaping him. The region's rich martial, ritualistic, and storytelling traditions cast a spell on him. He went on to study at the National School of Drama (NSD), graduating in 1974 under the mentorship of that doyen of the stage, Ebrahim Alkazi. But once he completed his course, Thiyam returned to Manipur rejecting the comforts of cultural centres in India's cities and launched the Chorus Repertory Theatre there in 1976. The decision would transform both his career and Indian theatre itself. Honours and that Padma Shri he returned Ratan Thiyam's contributions were acknowledged across India and the world with some of the highest accolades in the arts. He received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1987 for direction and was honoured with the Padma Shri in 1989, which he later returned as an act of protest and principle. In 2012, he was conferred the prestigious Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship, the highest recognition for a practising artist in India. Before all this, his landmark production Chakravyuh, by earning the Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Festival in 1987, established him as an international voice in contemporary theatre. Over the years, honours such as the Kalidas Samman (2005), Bharat Muni Samman (2011), Bhupen Hazarika Award (2013), META Lifetime Achievement Award (2016), and an honorary Doctor of Letters from Assam University (2013) affirmed his legacy across disciplines and regions. Thiyam also served as the Chairperson of the National School of Drama from 2013 to 2017. His tenure brought renewed attention to India's regional theatre traditions and the cultural wealth of the North-East. With him at the helm, the National School of Drama engaged more deeply with indigenous forms, and his influence helped legitimise voices that had long remained outside the Delhi-centric framework of Indian theatre. Devotee of slowness, silence and soul Ratan Thiyam leaves behind not just a repertoire but a philosophy. In an age that prizes speed and spectacle, he remained a devotee of slowness, silence, and soul. As the curtain falls on his remarkable life, it rises on a question for all of us: can we still make art with that kind of devotion? His passing is not only a personal loss for his family, colleagues, and audiences, but a blow to Indian theatre. And yet, in the chorus of Meitei drums, in the quiet chant of an unseen actor, and in the dreams of a stage being prepared in some distant rehearsal hall, his presence still lingers. (Ashutosh Kumar Thakur is a Bangalore-based literary critic and curator. He can be reached at ashutoshbthakur@
