ABSTRACT
Over the course of the last century, Indian theatre artists and scholars have debated the role that scenography and theatre architecture could play in the country’s emerging modern theatre culture. Precipitated by the ubiquity of representational proscenium theatre, which took root through the scenery-laden stages that had been built and furnished in colonial Bombay and Calcutta, these debates sought a contemporary stage that incorporated the minimalist aesthetic of various Indian folk theatres, as well as the pre-modern Sanskrit tradition. 1 Nobel Laureate, poet, and playwright Rabindranath Tagore encapsulated this attitude as early as 1913 in his brief but powerful essay, “The Stage,” in which he rebukes European stage practice for the limitations it places on the playwright’s unbounded imagination. He queries,
Why should the great be required to curb itself, for the sake of the petty? The stage that is in the Poet‘s mind has no lack of space or appurtenances. There scenes follow one another at the touch of his magic wand. The play is written for such stage and such scenes; the artificial platform with its hanging canvas is not worthy of a poet … is it too much to expect the audience to realize the simple truth that though the stage has its limits, the Poem has not?
(Tagore 2009: 433)