Excerpt from a much longer article by theatre activist Sudhanva Deshpande which appeared in the Economic & Political Weekly, april 4, 2009 vol xliv no 14-19.
Excerpt:
“Copyright disputes are cropping up in the field of theatre as well. Last year, a Mumbai-based theatre group was rehearsing their translation of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, a play which has been performed dozens of times in India, in d ifferent languages, when they received a communication from the agents of B recht’s estate that they would need to pay royalty before mounting the production, failing which legal action would be initiated. The theatre group tried to r eason with them – they were an amateur group, the performance was not for profit, and so on. To no avail. In the end, the t heatre group found an ingenious way out – they changed the name of the play, and stopped publicising that it was based on Brecht’s original.
The irony, of course, is that Brecht’s original was no original. It was a reworking of an 18th century play, John Gay’s The Beggars’ Opera. It may also be noted in passing that Brecht himself died in 1956, over 50 years ago.
More recently, a senior Tamil playwright alleged that his well-known play written in the 1970s was being passed off by a Kolkata playwright as his own, without even changing the name of the play. The Tamil playwright was not asking for royalty, he was merely protesting the appropriation of what he claims is his work under someone else’s name.
On the one hand, there is the legitimate issue of the right to be recognised as the creator of a particular work. On the other, corporate entities use copyright laws to clamp patently unfair restrictions on creators. I offer below some preliminary and provisional thoughts on the issue of c opyright in theatre.
In the theatre, the notion of “copying” as well as “reproducibility” works differently than in almost any other art. The theatre actor does not learn by copying her m aster, as a painter, sculptor, dancer or musician does (except in “classical” forms like Kathakali, which are highly coded). The modern theatre actor, from the very b eginning, is encouraged to improvise. The dialectic of theatre is that it simul taneously embodies reproducibility as well as resists it. It embodies reproducibility because players act out a play several times, over time (and most often, over space as well). However, it resists reproducibility of the mechanical or techno logical sort.
The act of theatre, while embodying reproducibility, resists it at a more fundamental level as well. It could be argued that no two performances of a play, even by the same set of players, at the same venue, one after another, are “copies” of one another. There is no one, unique original or master, which is copied again and again. Each performance is in fact a unique performance – the pace, rhythm, tempo, feel, power, c adence, energy, can, and do, vary over performances. Theatre is the art of the impermanent, the transient, the here and now.
Theatre, it could be argued, is the most “impure” of arts. It is an agglomeration of many arts (or crafts, if you will): writing, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, carpentry, design, tailoring, singing, dancing, acting, and so on. Any performance of a play is always much more than a reading of its script. In every language of the world, a play is always “watched”, never “heard”. In other words, a theatre performance is always sedimented – actors, musicians, designers, and so on, add their own layers over and above the text given to them by the playwright. Not to mention the very critical input of the theatre d irector, who welds all of this into a single artistic piece based on her vision and ” interpretation”.
In a word, at a very fundamental level, theatre resists copyright. A written and published playtext may be under copyright. However, in performance, the playtext has always-already transformed into a sedimented creation, the kernel of which may be a particular playtext. However, the same kernel may, and often does, produce two (or more) vastly different works of art. The layers of creation that deposit themselves over the kernel prove very hard to clearly delineate, separate, catalogue, and therefore copyright. How can you copyright Mohan Agashe’s highpitched nasal voice and heavy yet graceful gait that have come to define the character of Nana Phadanvis in Vijay Tendulkar’s Ghashiram Kotwal for generations of t heatre-lovers? In performance, Mohan Agashe’s acting, Bhaskar Chandavarkar’s music, Chandrakant Kale’s and Ravindra Sathe’s singing, Jabbar Patel’s direction, etc, all add to the kernel of Tendulkar’s playtext to transform it beyond the text. All this complicates enormously the question of “authorship”.
In actual fact, whatever their claims may be, playwrights are plagiarists. If Shakespeare is reputed to have based some of his plays on other contemporary plays which flopped, Brecht based many of his plays on other eminently successful plays. Many of Girish Karnad’s and Chandrasekhar Kambar’s plays are based on ancient myths and tales. Habib Tanvir has fashioned plays out of local folk tales. One of Govind Deshpande’s plays is a rewritten version of a Tendulkar play, with characters and situations from the original, but different politics. The history of theatre is replete with such and similar examples.
The field of modern Indian theatre has been predominantly an amateur field, in that most of the theatre activity in India is neither professional nor commercial in n ature. With an absence of corporate i nterest, and a lackadaisical attitude of the state towards it, theatre earns, even in i nsta nces where it is commercial or professional, very little revenue. Therefore, models or notions of rights developed on the commercial stages of the west have l ittle or no relevance to Indian theatre practitioners.
It would be interesting to compile instances of copyright/authorship disputes in Indian theatre. It would also be interesting to see how disputes have traditionally been settled. One particularly striking instance that springs to mind is from the 1970s. The director Satyadev Dubey took up Achyut Vaze’s Sofa-cum-Bed for production. Vaze hated Dubey’s production. When he approached some other practitioners (including Vijay Tendulkar), it was suggested to him that he mount his own production. Which he did, and the two productions played side by side for a while. A postscript to the controversy is that Vaze apparently said to Dubey that if he was so fond of rewriting other people’s plays, why doesn’t he write his own. Dubey took up the challenge, and has since been writing plays as well as d irecting.
Most directors end up reworking playscripts. In 1988, when Safdar Hashmi wrote a play based on Premchand’s story and the director Habib Tanvir worked extensively on it, expanding scenes, editing, cutting, etc, Hashmi felt privileged to a cknowledge Tanvir as his co-author for Moteram ka Satyagraha. A couple of years later, when Tanvir did the same to Asghar Wajahat’s Jis Lahore Nahi Vekhya Voh Janmya Hi Nahi, Wajahat made sure that the published version was his original script rather than Tanvir’s reworked version. It would be interesting to see how the latest spat, between the Tamil and Bengali playwrights I referred to at the outset, pans out.”