Tom Stoppard let us stage radio play ‘Darkside’ for free: Mumbai-based theater director Atul Kumar

Atul Kumar

Mumbai-based theater director Atul Kumar (The Company Theatre), is behind many successful theater productions. For example, there is his collaboration with Rajat Kapoor, the Joker series which included dramas like c for joker, Hamlet the Clown Prince And nothing like learKumar’s award winning play piya impersonator Opened at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in London and toured globally. But for many theater lovers, this is the opinion of British playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard. rosencrantz And Guildenstern is dead, The most memorable one is the actors performing on stilts.

Kumar says his favorite Stoppard play is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. But he has another special story from Stoppard, based on a work by the playwright that was never published – a radio play, dark sideWritten for the BBC to mark 40 years of Pink Floyd Dark side of the moonAccording to the hour-long “fantastic and psychedelic story” Guardian It contains music from the 1973 album. It was inspired by the album’s existential meditations on fear and greed and evidenced Stoppard’s deep interest in rock music. Pink Floyd collaborated with Stoppard on this project, and the BBC eventually recorded it as a radio play with actors Bill Nighy, Rufus Sewell and others. So what is the Atul Kumar connection? Well, his theater workshops usually ended with a performance by the participants in front of a ticketed audience, and they were set to Stoppard’s radio play. More from him:

“I have been doing these theater workshops for adults in Bombay for the last two to three years, and at the end of the workshop, I usually do a play with all the participants, which is then performed in the appropriate theater in front of regular audiences, ticketed audiences, etc. People who are in the workshops really get a very live experience of a theater performance.”Atul Kumar actor and director

i wanted to keep this radio play [Darkside] On stage, which had never been done. I didn’t even know whether they would entertain the idea of ​​a radio play, not published, as a stage performance. I was in England at that time and I tried to contact him [Stoppard]He was not feeling very well and I was told that he was not receiving any visitors as his condition was critical,

But he still paid attention to his emails from all over the world every day. His secretary would read some sort of filtered emails and he would dictate replies through them. So, I took the chance and wrote to him, ‘Sir, this is your radio play and I would like to put it on stage in India, in Bombay.’ Of course, his relationship with India is very special [his childhood in the country and his time with his muse and actress] Felicity Kendall and her family and Prithvi Theatre.

I sent the email in the morning and the same evening, I got a reply from them saying that they would be happy for us to put it on stage, do a theater performance and please ‘don’t worry about any rights and royalties and permissions or whatever.’

He openly gave us the play to perform in Bombay, which we did. We did two shows of it and it is still in my mind to revive it with a proper theater group at a later stage. It shows the man’s generosity and understanding that ultimately what he has written belongs to all of us. He was very generous and didn’t ask for any money because we couldn’t possibly afford that kind of royalty. Now that he is gone, there are many of his plays that I haven’t even read and now people are writing about them.

So, yes, I’m going to collect them and start reading again. What a huge loss.