Tom Stoppard let us stage radio play ‘Darkside’ for free: Mumbai-based theatre director Atul Kumar

Atul Kumar

Mumbai-based theatre director Atul Kumar (The Company Theatre), is behind numerous successful theatre productions. There is his collaboration with Rajat Kapoor, for instance, the clown series that included plays such as C for Clown, Hamlet the Clown Prince and Nothing Like Lear. Kumar’s award-winning play Piya Behrupiya opened at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London and went on to tour globally. But for many theatregoers, it is his take on British playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, with actors performing on stilts, that is most memorable.

Kumar says his favourite Stoppard play is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. But he has another special Stoppard story, based on one of the playwright’s works that was never published — a radio play, Darkside, written for the BBC to mark 40 years of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. The hour long “fantastical and psychedelic story” according to The Guardian features music from the 1973 album. It was inspired by the album’s existential meditations on fear and greed and proved Stoppard’s deep interest in rock music. Pink Floyd collaborated with Stoppard on the project, and the BBC eventually recorded it as a radio play with the actors Bill Nighy, Rufus Sewell and others. So what is the Atul Kumar connection? Well his theatre workshops usually end with a performance by the participants, in front of a ticketed audience, and he was set on Stoppard’s radio play. More from him:

“I have been doing these theatre workshops for the last two to three years in Bombay for adults, and at the end of the workshop, I normally do a play with all the participants, which is then performed in front of a regular audience, ticketed audience, etc., in proper theatres. The people who are in the workshop actually get a very sort of live experience of a theatre performance.”Atul Kumar Actor and director

I wanted to put this radio play [Darkside] on stage, which had never been done. I didn’t even know if they will entertain the idea of a radio play, which is not published, as a stage performance. I was in England at the time, and tried to contact him [Stoppard]. He was not feeling very well and I was told he was not meeting any visitors because his condition was delicate.

But he would still attend to his emails from around the world every day. His secretary would read out some sort of filtered emails and he would narrate a reply via her. So, I took a chance and wrote to him saying, ‘Sir, this is your radio play and I would like to put it on stage in India, in Bombay’. His connection with India, of course, is very special, because of [his childhood in the country and his time with his muse and actress] Felicity Kendal and their family and Prithvi Theatre.

I sent the email in the morning and that same evening, I got a reply from him saying he would be delighted for us to put it on stage, to do a theatre performance and please not to ‘worry about any rights and royalties and permissions or whatever’.

He just openly gave us the play to be performed in Bombay, which we did. We did two shows of it and it’s still on my cards to revive it with a proper theatre ensemble at a later stage. That just showed the man’s magnanimity and an understanding that finally what he has written belongs to all of us. He was very generous and didn’t ask for any money because we possibly couldn’t afford that kind of royalty anyway. Now that he’s gone, there are many plays of his that I haven’t even read and now people are writing about them.

So, yeah, I’m going to collect them and start reading again. What a loss.