World Theatre Day Address 2025
- Mahesh Elkunchwar
- Mar 27
- 2 min read
Today, more than ever before, theatre is playing a crucial role in our lives. The world is becoming smaller; it is being called a global village. It is one, some say, but it is one in nullity. It is filled with a faceless crowd and the idea of a community is disappearing fast. Everybody is now a community of ‘one’. The menace that hangs in the atmosphere, like an unspecified threat, has made people withdraw into their own private cocoons for safety. People do not put trust in each other anymore, do not share, are afraid of any communication, lest they be hurt, or betrayed, or destroyed. We are all alienated from each other and from ourselves.
It is theatre that can connect people now. It speaks about bitter truths, and the people thirsty for it, come together in a darkened auditorium, to share it with each other, and to live it together. The actor on the stage and the hundred people watching him in silence breathe together, their pulse throbs together, their hearts join in. A hundred souls become one and bathe together in the luminosity of truth. It is an ennobling experience, a kind of purification.
The most glorious moments in the theatre, for the people who actually make it, are those when the play goes on the rehearsal floor. That is when those involved are trapped in a closed, almost claustrophobic space—emotional and otherwise. This is where we are compelled to drop our masks, lay bare our vulnerabilities, unite in an excruciatingly joyous journey of exploring the text, ourselves and each other. This is the real togetherness we are all hungry for—a creative togetherness. This is when we hate, love, and despair together with all our defenses dropped. This is when real human contact is established, which otherwise is so rare and almost shunned in our fiercely individuated, independent lives. But the magic disappears the moment the play opens. Standing ovations, rave notices, adulation, and fame may follow but they are fringe benefits. They mean little or nothing to an artist who is on a voyage into the interior and in search of genuine human contact.
Theatre will always exist, because people will always be hungry for communication, for connection.
Mahesh Elkunchwar, (Literature Live! Lifetime Award recipient 2022) was Head of the Department of English Literature at the University of Nagpur. He has taught at the Film and Television Institute, Pune and at the National School of Drama, New Delhi. He has written 20 plays, in addition to his theoretical writings, critical works, and his work in India's Parallel Cinema as actor and screenwriter. He is considered one of the foremost playwrights in Marathi and Indian theatre. He has received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship, the highest honour in performing arts in India. His latest book, ‘The Necropolis Trilogy, is a collection of musings on his childhood and youth.