Vivaan Shah: Theatre not affected by ott revolution

Vivaan Shah describes theatre as the ldquolast bastionrdquo that has stood its ground Even as people have traded bigscreen releases for the comfort of OTT offerings the actor notes that audiences continue to step out of their homes to watch their favourite plays What does he make of cineplays being televised ldquoItrsquos an old traditionrdquo he says as he features in Zee Theatrersquos anthology Koi Baat Chale For the endeavour Shah has done a oneact play of his favourite author Munshi Premchandrsquos Gulli Danda In conversation with midday he talks about the Seema Pahwadirected oneact teleplay and how the medium inspires people to take up literatureEdited excerpts from the interviewWhat goes into preparing for a oneact play readingTo do his riyaaz all an actor has to do is start reading a short story aloud and do a monologue The process of doing a monologue is like second nature to me I did a piece called Bade Bhaisaab for my father Naseeruddin Shah in a play which is also written by Munshi Premchand When Seema ji Pahwa director asked me to do Gulli Danda I was wellversed in oneact playsWhich of Premchandrsquos stories do you often go back toMy favourite Premchand story is Shatranj Ke Khiladi which is about an important transitional phase in the history of Lucknow and the Nawabi culture It is an interesting satire on the upper classes Premchandrsquos literature has humour humanity and social commentaryHad you read Gulli Danda before venturing into this oneact playI had not read it until Seema ji handed me the piece It is a moving piece that deals with inequality and friendship of two young boys mdash one belongs to a lower caste and the narrator comes from a middleclass background Social hierarchies and inequalities donrsquot rear their head in onersquos childhood because children look at each other purely as human beings rather than the baggage that adults come withPremchandrsquos stories have influenced generations But do you think there is an audience for monologues in this generationIf you go to Prithvi Theatre there is a crowd of people that go to bookstores to explore varied literary pieces They are not necessarily people from an English ethos they come from a world of Hindi literature The great thing about theatre is that it encourages people to seek out certain pieces of literature which they previously had not considered for reading After we did plays by Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chugtai a lot of young people in the audience sought out those booksDo you think OTT can affect theatre the way it affected bigscreen releasesI believe theatre is the one thing that OTT can never affect What is unique about the theatre experience is the exchange of energies between the performer and audience Itrsquos the same feeling you get at a live music concert Theatre is probably the last bastion for which people are willing to leave their homes put their cell phones off and be transported to a different world It cannot be affected by the OTT revolutionYour take on televising playsTheatrical purists may have mixed emotions about it but cineplay is an old tradition In the rsquo50s US it was called Playhouse 20s where people telecast live theatre Henry Jaynes Fonda and Sidney Lumet came out of that tradition After that in the rsquo70s in England the concept of film plays started King Lear and Othello were performed as cineplaysAlso ReadFelt Naseer bhai would tell me not to make it Kuttey director Aasmaan Bhardwaj