Frederick Noronha
By some chance, these five books came my way via a ‘book exchange’. It was a welcome addition. Five volumes of Konkani plays, making for a total of 20 plays. For sure, the value of such a work will only grow in time, in any Goa books collection.
Listed as Volumes 1 to 5, all these are by Tomazinho Cardozo. The senior citizen, educationist, politician, former Assembly Speaker, and overall creative person, has not only spent a lifetime in Konkani theatre and culture, but also repeatedly stressed the need to preserve scripts and recordings of plays that have been staged now, for the future.
Cardozo may have his critics as in any creative field. But he has systematically pushed to build the field of the tiatr, to get some degree of institutional acceptance for it, and to make changes that help it to get somewhat better noticed and appreciated. He has also led by example, documenting his own plays and scripts, even as he suggested others do the same.
Not surprisingly, one can end up with a better recall for Cardozo’s work. Plays of his like Mhovall Vikh (Sweet Poison), Uttram ani Kornneyom (Words and Deeds), Hello Uncle, Kanttech Kantte (Thorns… and Even More Thorns), Sankhlleo (Links or Chains), Bhurgim Amchi Girestkay (Children are our Wealth), Dita Toxem Gheta (Taking as One Gives), Goa.. Going.. Gone?, and Zhogzhogta Titleim Bhangar Nhoi! (All That Glitters Is Not Gold) would be familiar to some readers.
Scripts of all these plays are reproduced in the books here. At the start of each, there’s a brief introduction to the context to the play; this makes it more understandable than even if you saw it on stage, perhaps. After the curtains fall on the text, we get a hint of who are the characters in the play. We are also told who played which character, and there’s a listing of the awards each play received. Useful information.
Cardozo has been known as a long-time campaigner for the tiatr scripts to get printed and preserved. How successful he has been in convincing his colleagues in the field is not clear, though he has made a great start himself.
Undeniably, plays need to be preserved and, if possible, published too. There’s a reason for this: performance is ephemeral or short-lasting. Once the actors leave the stage, much of the work disappears with them. This can be changed if the text is preserved, read, studied, revived or even reinterpreted.
Publication allows plays to reach audiences beyond the stage. It allows directors and actors to create future performances. Getting the ideas down into print also places the playwright’s work within the literary and cultural record.
This is particularly important for local, small language and minority theatre traditions. More so here, unpublished scripts can easily get lost.
Of course, publishing a play does not replace a performance. Both are different forms of the work. Yet, this option creates a useful archive. Publishing plays is generally a good idea, especially if it goes along with documentation of the production and context. This Cardozo does here too.
Why does so little documentation of theatre happen in Goa? Or, to start with an even more basic question: how active is Goan theatre? Surprisingly active, but extremely under-document. (In recent times, we find more coverage of the local tiatr in the English-language newspapers though.) Goan theatre covers Konkani in Roman and Devanagari scripts, Marathi, Portuguese (more so in the past), English (a little) and, to some extent, Hindi and other languages. Once, radio plays were popular too.
There’s a wide range. From the popular tiatr and khell-tiatr of the Catholic Konkani world, to traditional folk and ritual performance, Marathi sangeet natak and amateur theatre, modern experimental and socially engaged theatre, school and college productions, and contemporary English- and Konkani-language theatre groups.
Goan theatre’s history goes back decades. Yet much of this theatrical heritage remains ephemeral (or passing) and poorly archived. Scripts, posters, programmes, recordings, production photographs and information about performers are scattered among individuals and institutions. Some plays exist in the memory of those who staged or watched them.
Why so? One gets the impression that those who work very hard to keep the tiatr viable and vibrant are more concerned with their own stage shows. Rightly or otherwise, they might prefer not to have their productions reduced to text. Either because they see it as a distraction, or a waste of time. Or because they feel it might cut into their audiences which keep the tiatr viable.
Returns from print are small. Many old scripts are lost. Playwrights have little incentive to prepare and release their manuscripts. More so, when they are planning future productions, and are worried about their copyrights. In Goa, ideas tend to get copied (or “reverse-engineered”) at times, and this also can be a legitimate fear.
In recent times, particularly after 1987, there has also been limited publishing infrastructure for Roman-script Konkani. Institutions such as the Tiatr Academy of Goa and Dalgado Konkani Akademi have tried to address this through publication and financial-support schemes, recognising that many scripts are otherwise likely to disappear.
A published play is tougher to read than a novel. It emerges through performance. Theatre depends on actors’ voices, movement, gesture, pauses, lighting, space and interaction with an audience.
Yet, one can’t argue that plays are “meant to be seen and heard, not read”. Elsewhere, plays have a long history of both performance and reading. But a reader of a play would have to imagine things on their own.
Incidentally, the advantages of fixing plays on paper is there for all to see. Not long back, during the pandemic, artiste Michael Gracias revived the decades-old Konkani play from Bombay, Cavelchi Sundori (The Belle of Cavel). This is an amazing example of how an old Goan play can be rescued through archival work and performance.
The play was originally written by the early tiatr pioneer, João Agostinho Fernandes in 1893 and staged in 1895. It was his first original tiatr and was revived by Gracias in 2021-22 as part of the Tiatr Academy of Goa’s celebrations of Fernandes’s 150th birth anniversary.
From an original handwritten script, Gracias managed to painstakingly decipher it after two weeks of close work, before typing it out to make it usable for the actors. He then restructured the material and developed the musical presentation around it.
This work also drew attention in Mumbai-based publications like the Mid-Day (which has readers in that area of the metropolis), and also the Outlook magazine of Delhi.
The script itself was not completely unknown. It had survived in archival and theatrical records, including material documented in Andre Rafael Fernandes’s book When the Curtains Rise. But Gracias effectively brought the fragile historical text back into living theatre. This could be staged after decades of being ‘lost’.
The production even travelled beyond Goa, including performances in Cavel, Mumbai, where the 130-year-old play returned to the very neighbourhood that inspired its title.
There are other examples of how getting plays into print could help. Dr Isabel de Santa Rita Vas’ translation of Orlando Costa’s play as No Flowers, No Wreaths (Sem Flores Nem Coroas), done some years back, is now being taught to students in Thailand, of all places.
But this is not an easy task. At least one translator has been waiting to get a major publisher for the translated work of a prominent Konkani dramatist from Goa. Sometimes, the market can be heartless. Which is why more options need to be created.
