Postdramatic Theatre and India: Theatre-Making Since the 1990s

This book revisits Hans-Thies Lehmann’s theory of the postdramatic and participates in the ongoing debate on the theatre paradigm by placing contemporary Indian performance within it. None of the Indian theatre-makers under study built their works directly on the Euro-American model of postdramatic theatre, but many have used its vocabulary and apparatus in innovative, transnational ways. Their principal aim was to invigorate the language of Indian urban theatre, which had turned stale under the stronghold of realism inherited from colonial stage practice or prescriptive under the decolonizing drive of the ‘theatre of roots’ movement after independence. Emerging out of a set of different historical and cultural contexts, their productions have eventually expanded and diversified the postdramatic framework by crosspollinating it with regional performance forms.

Theatre in India today includes devised performance, storytelling across forms, theatre solos, cross-media performance, theatre installations, scenographic theatre, theatre-as-event, reality theatre, and so on.

The book balances theory, context and praxis, developing a new area of scholarship in Indian theatre. Interspersed throughout are Indian theatre-makers’ clarifications of their own practices vis-a-vis those in Europe and the US.