Theatre

Theater in modern Malayalam literature did not begin to flourish until late into the nineteenth century. Since the dominant Hindu culture had elaborate traditions of Temple Theater such as Koodiyattam, Thullal and Kathakali, realistic drama failed to receive respectability or audience.

The Portuguese contact had helped the development of a Christian theater and the Christians who lived primarily in central Kerala staged plays on the history of Charlemagne, Jacob of the Old Testament, and on the lives of various saints. Most churches produced passion plays and gospel enactments, which went unnoticed by the mainstream culture.

Only after Valia Koyil Thampuran's translation of Kalidasa's Sakuntala (1882) did drama begin to get the proper attention of Malayalam writers. The Kalidasa play set off a stream of translations and borrowings from Sanskrit and English, and following Varghese Mappilai's adaptation in 1893 of Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare plays began to appear. The novelist C. V. Raman Pillai also produced adaptations of English neo-classical dramas of Sheridan and Goldsmith. His Kurupilla Kalari (A Chaotic Place, 1909)) provided a model for the future development of comedy, and E. V. Krishna Pillai's farces filled the lacuna of a dramatic tradition in Malayalam.

At this point, Thottakkat Ikkavamma, the first woman dramatist in Malayalam, introduced her play Subhadrarjunam with a proclamation that it was not to the glory of the Muse that women were incompetent in writing plays. With the rise of Communism, drama became popular as an expression of the revolutionary zeal of the emerging political culture.

The Progressive writers were at the vanguard of the new theater movement. With Thoppil Bhasi's socialist realist play Ningalenne Kammunistakki (You Made Me A Communist, 1952) performed by the Kerala People's Arts Club in every village and town in the state, Malayalam Theater came of age. And it was C. J. Thomas who ushered in the modernist phase with his Avan Vintum Varunnu! (Behold! He Comes Again, 1949) and Crime 27 (1954). Krishna Pillai's adaptation of Ibsen, especially in his Bhagna Bhavanam (Broken Home) helped the refinement of the theater and led to further adaptations and translations from Continental Drama.

With the enormous success of a dozen plays written and produced by N. N. Pillai the psychological and existential drama became a dominant part of Malayalam literature. With Thoppil Bhasi, N. N. Pillai, and K. T. Muhammad, touring theater companies became a major cultural factor in Kerala, but in the late 60s, the artistic theater declined with the rise of the popular, commercialized theater, performed by groups like Alleppey Theaters and Kalanilayam and by dozens of smaller professional and amateur companies located throughout the state. That most of these performing groups are still patronized by Hindu temples and church organizations explains the general weakness of modern Malayalam drama.

Other important playwrights of the mid-century include Ponkunnam Varkey, C. N. Srikantan Nair, Kainikkara Kumara Pillai, Thikodeyan, T. N. Gopinathan Nair, K. T. Muhammad, P. R. Chandran, and C. L. Jose. Though television and the film industry have weakened the theater, a new wave of post-modernist drama has begun to take root rivaling the mainstream theater.

Again, like the fiction writers and poets, their formal approach is determined by a new anchoring in pre-colonial cultural forms, reinterpreted for a world that has lost much of the certainties of modernism. G. Sankara Pillai, Vayala Vasudevan Pillai, Vasu Pradeep, Kadavoor Chandran Pillai, S. Ramesan Nair, Narendra Prasad and Kavalam Narayana Panickar lead this new generation. They have begun to re-link theater with Kerala's ancient traditions of ritual theater.

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