Decoding the Dramaturgy of Failure
It’s the end of a rehearsal, the first full run-through of a new play. As the actors wind up and gather their belongings, you are standing quite still in the centre of the room. You’ve said you will do notes tomorrow because it is late, and everyone is exhausted. They shuffle around you, quietly saying “good night”.
Two of your company members stay on: the assistant director, who is also your friend, and the production manager, who is also an actor, also your friend. Before you can find the words to address the moment, you find that you have somehow moved out of yourself and into the paralysed position of someone who has just witnessed a car crash. You say, “Never seen something that’s been directed so badly.” And then you begin to weep.
Your collaborators, your friends, hug and console you. “There’s still a whole week left. The problems are fixable.” They begin to make a list, forge a plan, a rescue mission, but everything sounds futile. You are in the pit and your mind races back to the first time you read the script to a room full of people who told you with enthusiasm how good it was and how much they were looking forward to seeing it staged. Were they lying? Or have you let them down? How could it have gone so wrong? Whoever told you that you could do this for a living?
This is a story from a theatre production. It doesn’t matter which one. And it doesn’t matter what happened before or after, what was dreamed and what was salvaged, what was proposed and what accomplished. You’ve read books, watched videos and heard stories of failure romanticised, as something that the heroic artist must experience and overcome, to emerge on the other side humbled, sober, even grateful. Failure, the event. The useful anecdote. Failure, the ruthless, smug imp come to teach you a lesson. But the truth is that when you are staring it right in the face, failure sucks. It arrives without invitation. It often has no logic. And it exercises enough influence to fill you with that thing that Mallika Shah just wrote about here last month – doubt. In those moments what is often in short supply is what you need the most: a little bit of perspective. You cannot bring yourself to objectively reason that you have experienced failure because you risked something, and that you risked something because it mattered.
Why are there different standards to how we view an experiment in science and art? The propensity for failure is embedded in the expectation and outcome of scientific experiment. You must fail in order to know more, to know better. To get it right on your first go could be seen as sheer luck – a fluke. Whereas getting it wrong again and again and again over decades till one day, hurrah, it works – that’s the yarn of scientific endeavour, isn’t it? It’s how people win Nobel Prizes. All around the world, governments, corporate companies, institutions and billionaires pour money into laboratories where scientists and researchers fail every day. Many of them will spend a whole lifetime not finding or achieving or proving the thing they set out to do and yet they have legitimate, respected and well-paying careers. In their insulated private laboratories, failure is a necessary and repeating moment.
But in the arts, a failed experiment on a public stage can feel like a death knell, or at least invite the verdict of wastefulness. Of opportunity and time and money and potential. This is mostly because we have situated the assessment of artistic work, its legitimacy and cultural value at the moment of public presentation. With cinema, most forms of visual art and pop music, this arguably makes sense because in those cases there is a definitive product, a marketplace and a culture of criticism. Theatre, or let us be more specific here, independent/experimental theatre (which is most theatre in this part of the world these days) doesn’t quite work like that. What exactly is the product in the theatre? The show itself, the artist, the idea? Only so much can be gauged by how a play does financially or by how many people come to see it, and there is almost no one writing or speaking about theatre in public and social media. It is a chronically under-funded art form and the spaces for it in public life (and in the larger public imagination) are shrinking. Does it make any sense then to judge success or failure in the theatre at the site and occasion of public performance?
Today I sometimes feel like an emphatic response to your play is only partly about the show itself. It also feels like the audience is standing up to celebrate their fragile kinship with you, the performers, as together you continue to burn the candle for live performance in this hyper-digital age. Then there are other spaces and festivals that feel decidedly less cathartic. Here you find yourself projecting your insecurity and fear onto the body language of the audience: still, stony-faced, heads tilted, and arms folded, waiting to be convinced, to be shaken out of their seeming indifference and malaise. This is altogether too much pressure, too much of a reckoning to place on them and the single incident of a performance.
The space for theatre makers to experiment and fail must also be a laboratory. That word is, in fact, not uncommon to theatre parlance; drama schools, companies and spaces use it all the time. The idea of the lab in the theatre is plural and versatile. It is the workshop, the classroom, the rehearsal and the adda. And whether these are spaces for research, investigation, discussion or playmaking, their value is predicated on the capacity to harbour unfettered exploration. Priyanka Pathak, a performance maker and scholar, once told me that we should be teaching “the pedagogy of failure”. To me this means that the practice and processes of creative work and learning must offer the space and time for repeated accident, error and review – just as the sciences do. Failure must not be written off as something that didn’t happen but rather a thing that did happen in order to enable other things to succeed it.
The theatre seems almost the perfect medium for this because – as Nisha Abdulla has spoken of here before – repetition is one of its core dramatic principles. We come to the room to play, day after day. Often what we’re looking to achieve – getting a puppet to breathe, toppling an argument on its head, making an audience laugh – can seem daunting. When it happens by chance we have to ask – can we repeat this? How, precisely? Because even though an audience can be confounded and rest comfortably in the mystery of things, the artist cannot be mystified by the process. They must know how such a thing is possible. Sometimes to know what not to do or what doesn’t work is the first step in understanding those mechanics.
In my interactions with students and theatre makers these days, I sometimes sense that the anticipation of failure is more crippling than failure itself. It is a precipice from which it is much easier to step back, to withdraw into yourself and wait for more information, better circumstances or greater odds. I’ve been thinking of the ancient figure of Ouroboros – the snake that eats its own tail. At first glance, it appears to be a symbol of self-destruction, or more accurately, self-consumption. It could read like the ultimate act of self-sabotage – to eat yourself, swallow your own ambition whole, before anyone else can. But on closer study, Ouroboros is in fact the representation of the cyclical nature of things, and of self-renewal. The Egyptians believe that all sense of formal order was affected and influenced by formless disorder that allowed it to shed its skin, to regenerate and begin again. Could failure in the artists’ laboratory enable such a shedding of expectation, fear, cynicism and self-censorship – an exo-skeleton that falls away and allows us to feel lighter and braver?
Almost exactly a year ago, I was working on the production Rihla with the Aagaaz Repertory. Adapted from a text by the Greek playwright Andreas Flourakis, it is the story of six misfits fed up with the state of their nation and looking to find a new place to call home. We were reviving the play after a three year gap that included, among other things, the pandemic and the CAA/NRC protests. The actors had all transitioned from their late teens to their early twenties; I had turned forty. It was the middle of Ramzan. Each day we sat in a circle as the actors, exhausted and hungry, broke their fast. We barely spoke a word but it was abundantly clear to all of us that the play was not working. We were not making any headway and all our ideas seemed uninspired. At many points it felt to me that it would be a merciful decision to stop and let it go. But somehow, we seem to have held on to some reserve of faith to keep going on. Rather than to escape this impasse, we needed to return to it every day. It was almost as if we had to wrestle with the memory, the ghost of the previous show and then forget it in order to find something that belonged to this new moment. And this could only come with time. The whole situation also appropriately mirrored the fate of the characters at the end of our play. As the long day’s journey draws to a close, it appears that they are nowhere closer to their unknown destination. Ragged and weary, they ask each other:
Tomorrow, again?
Yes. Tomorrow.
Neel Chaudhuri is a playwright and theatre director based in New Delhi. He is a founder member and former Artistic Director of The Tadpole Repertory.
