Abhilash Pillai's Midnight's Children: Performing Politics through Optics

Abhilash Pillai's stage adaptation of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (2005-6) introduced a new visual language to Indian theatre, conceiving performance between theatre and cinema. Pillai's work presents history as memory, amnesia and re-remembering within the framework of a multisensorial scenography that largely uses the vocabularies of the Bollywood film industry. The politics of the performance lies less in the thematic than in its optical dynamics, different as they are from both scene painting and the aestheticization of the public sphere. The production shows how theatre experience in a media society may primarily build on the perceptual, but without dismissing text or suspending the cognitive altogether. The visual media are used more as an intervention in politico-aesthetic discourse than as mere technology. As I explain the reasons for the long absence of any scholarly study of the production, I also consider its relevance to the current political scene in India.

Automated summary

Abhilash Pillai's stage adaptation of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children introduced a new visual language to Indian theatre, blurring the boundaries between theatre and cinema. The production uses a multisensorial scenography inspired by Bollywood to present history as memory, amnesia, and re-remembering. The political significance of the performance lies in its optical dynamics and intervention in politico-aesthetic discourse, rather than its thematic elements.