Award-winning author Cyrus Mistry on his journey as a playwright over the years

Award-winning author Cyrus Mistry, who is out with a new collection of plays, once wished to churn drama after drama for Mumbai’s theatre-loving audience. He tells us why he was forced to abandon that dream

We will begin from the end, because if there’s anything we’ve learnt after a 30-minute interview with author-playwright Cyrus Mistry, it is patience.

Mistry, who grew up and lived in Mumbai, and now resides in the cool confines of Kodaikanal, tells us matter-of-factly that he “waited”. And for a very long time. This was when he was in his 20s—a time when his mind was single-mindedly focussed on becoming a playwright, and the validation came sooner than he had expected.

In 1978, Mistry bagged the Sultan Padamsee Award for Playwriting, for his now masterpiece Doongaji House, which explores the travails of a Parsi family, once glowing in affluence, and living in a dilapidated building in Dhobi Talao. The troubled protagonists, the “nearly 70, slight of build” patriarch Hormusji and his wife Piroja, who dwell and seethe over their losses of fortune, family and love, depicted a maturity that was unusual, especially because they were the creation of a first-time 21-year-old writer.  

Mistry’s win was no mean feat. The competition had been sponsored by the renowned Theatre Group of Bombay, and was considered prestigious, soliciting entries from both, NRI and Indian playwrights. “The cash reward of R5,000 might seem insignificant today, but back then, it was quite a lot of money,” he says over a phone call. If anything, the award allayed Mistry’s doubts about his choice of career. “To be honest, it was the only choice I really had, because it was the only thing I knew I was good at,” he confesses. Reluctant at first to join the rat race, Mistry gave it a try with short six-month stints at The Indian Express and the Debonair magazine. “But the win made me confident about being able to write [more plays].” He quit his job and began freelancing to support himself. 

In the introduction of his new collection of plays, published by Aleph Book Company, and which gets its title from his first-ever play, we, however, learn that Mistry was forced to wait inordinately, before he could bring out more plays. “With no practical experience in theatre, I needed to find out if my play could breathe and come alive on stage,” he shares in the book, “But the worthies of Theatre Group procrastinated... Until one day the truth was stated more bluntly at a committee meeting to which I had been summoned: ‘We find this play commercially unviable,’ I was told. ‘We can produce it only if you [as playwright] undertake to raise R1 lakh in advertising revenue to support the production.”

The play was finally produced by Toni Patel of Stage Two in 1990. Mistry wrote his second play, The Legacy of Rage, only in 1992, 14 years after his first. “I felt, unreasonably perhaps, that until you can see your work put up on stage, and hear the lines, and decide how you would like to write your next play, it would be difficult to get on,” he tells us now, “I suppose there are plays which do very well, but I never wrote those kind of plays myself. What I wrote suffered these long years of waiting.”

The two plays and a third, A Flowering of Disorder, previously unpublished and unstaged, which offers a glimpse into a middle-class Parsi family struggling to cope in the burgeoning Mumbai metropolis, and which he wrote as recently as eight years ago, are part of his new collection. “It was my idea to get them published. Two of these plays have come out in two or three different editions, but separately. I thought it would be a good idea to have them all [including the new one] together in one volume,” he says.

Some of Mistry’s early influences in his playwriting journey were Russian writer Anton Chekhov, and Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen whose celebrated three-act play, A Doll’s House (1879), continues to be part of the induction lesson for any dramatist. The inspiration for Mistry’s stories often came from home and his Parsi lineage; they were subjects he knew intimately. “I guess every writer uses his environment and his experiences, as his raw material for his work. There is a fair amount of autobiographical context in Doongaji House, which is from my family’s past.” But picking up these biographical details is simply not enough, he says. “One has to work it all in, and it has to be transformed in the process. Somehow, that transformation has to happen for it to acquire the status of art, and be accepted as a literary creation.”  

While his Indian-Canadian writer brother Rohinton Mistry grappled with similar tropes of Bombay and being Parsi in long-form, penning award-winning fiction—Family Matters, A Fine Balance and Booker shortlist Such a Long Journey—Mistry, at least initially, resisted the form. More because, he wanted to play to his strengths. “I had a feeling for being able to write dialogues,” he says, of why he wanted to become a playwright instead. “To catch the nuances of colloquial speech or to sort of capture the rhythms and sounds of the vernacular in English, came to me more easily... on the other hand, I found writing a piece of prose to be quiet gruelling.”

Unfortunately, the city then, and even now, he suspects, hasn’t been able to create a thriving ecosystem for those who enjoy writing a good drama for stage. “In any profession, you need it to be financially viable to give you that incentive to go on...” As a playwright, he barely had any. His second play, The Legacy of Rage, which looked at a dysfunctional East Indian family in Mumbai squabbling over their inheritance, was produced and directed by Joy Fernandes, and enjoyed a week’s run at a Bandra theatre. It was a great production, but there was no money in it for him, he shares. “I suppose you need a philanthropist or the government to give grants for productions of plays. I don’t know what else one can do.”

It’s around then that he contemplated writing a novel. “If you publish a novel, you hope of getting paid something. With plays, there is no such provision,” he says, “But I had this dread about writing one. I had even made notes for it, which were sitting with me for 20 years, but I never bothered attempting. It was only after my illness [a physical ailment that compelled him to leave Mumbai and move to Kodaikanal] that I felt that it was time to do something.”

He made his debut as a novelist in 2005, when he was in his 40s, with The Radiance of Ashes, which was published by Picador UK. Mistry has since gone on to write three others. In 2014, he won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer.

Theatre, however, still rules his heart. He tells us never to underestimate the power of dialogues. “They matter a great deal,” he says, “One could write a whole novel, entirely in dialogue form. The spoken word is able to capture the whole essence of a character. It is a very compressed form of writing, in the way that poems are compressed. “

He, however, is still unsure about how he has evolved between his first play, and the last. “I haven’t really examined that,” he confesses, “But in a sense, I feel, the first which I wrote at 21, was more effective. Because, when you are young, you are full of energy and vision... this is difficult to replicate later. But maybe, what I am saying, is not really true. My most recent [A Flowering of Disorder] hasn’t been produced yet for me to be confident about it.”

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