4 months ago
3
Playwright, theatre manager and writer Gowri Ramnarayan was unexpectedly pleased erstwhile 30 radical turned up for her store titled, ‘Hands on: Write a Play’, astatine The Hindu Lit For Life connected Sunday (January 18, 2026). “I was amazed to spot truthful galore radical funny successful playwriting,” she said, calling theatre a “niche successful Chennai.” Not galore volition work a play unless prescribed to them by a assemblage program oregon schoolhouse syllabus, she pointed out.
The workshop’s attendees included engineers, teachers, theatre enthusiasts, and aspiring playwrights. It was genuinely a “mixed group”, noted Ms. Ramnarayan. “Even idiosyncratic similar me, who doesn’t cognize overmuch astir theatre, could understand,” said pupil attendee Angeline Anto.
‘Voice for the voiceless’
“Why bash you privation to constitute a play?” the playwright asked. Sunandan Dutta, 31, a robotics technologist based successful Calcutta, answered: “My inheritance is successful technology, but I privation to cognize however to constitute subject into plays.” Other attendees noted that stories are simply amended told done theatre owed to its being specified a nonstop signifier of storytelling.
Ms. Ramnarayan offered them elemental but effectual advice: “If you privation to constitute a play, you request to work plays critically.”
She work them an excerpt from her ain play, When Things Fall Apart, which she described arsenic “a protestation play.” It reinterprets an occurrence successful the Mahabharata, proving that it imaginable to speech astir important existent issues utilizing a mythic story. “Theatre itself is rebellion,” she said to the attendees, “You are a dependable for the voiceless.”
Show, not tell
Ms. Ramnarayan began the interactive league by making the important favoritism betwixt playwriting and fabrication writing. The occupation of a playwright goes beyond the script, requiring them to wage attraction to method aspects similar lighting, space, and however props mightiness work.
“A play comes live connected the stage, not the page,” she emphasised. The writer indispensable inquire herself, “Where are the actors going to be?” Theatre is simply a mean that requires the playwright to visualise the signifier and hone trade skills, an workout that is arsenic originative arsenic it is intellectual, she said.
“Let’s look astatine however the ancients saw theatre,” she said, outlining the six Aristotelian rules of play arsenic good arsenic Bharata’s conception of vyabichari bhava, oregon oscillating emotions. According to Ms. Ramnarayan, the cardinal is not to narrate but alternatively to “show” however the characters feel. “The assemblage loves a challenge,” she said. This rule of showing alternatively than telling of emotion was past practiced done an workout that asked attendees to instrumentality classical fables and crook them into dialogues, revealing the nuanced emotion successful age-old stories.
