Mumbai community protests the demolition of a chawl, tribals fight displacement, and Kashmiri children grapple with reality at this fortnight’s playwriting festival Writers’ Bloc. This is the third collaboration in nearly a decade between Mumbai theatre group Rage and London’s Royal Court Theatre – credited as "possibly the most famous writers’ theatre in the world" by Time Out London – along with the British Council and The Jindal South West Foundation. Playwrights who have benefited from the year-long series of residency workshops include Sachin Kundalkar and Anuvab Pal.

Unlike Writers’ Bloc 2 in 2007, which yielded a lot of "relationship plays", Rage’s Shernaz Patel observed that this year’s crop was influenced by the Court’s focus on contemporary Indian issues with a "very politically aware bunch" of young writers. In 2010, Rage founders Rahul da Cunha, Rajit Kapur and Patel picked 25 out of 104 scripts from across the country; the final cut of 12 was made by the Royal Court playwrights Carl Miller and April de Angelis, and the head of the Court’s international division, Elyse Dodgson.

Da Cunha, who participated in the first Writers’ Bloc in 2003, said that while workshop graduates now have a "fraternity" to offset the often isolated experience of playwriting, there is a growing sensitivity among the directors and actors who come in to read and eventually stage the scripts that "the written word is sacred here". Kapur, who omitted three pages of a script he is directing for the fest, added that the process also gives a playwright the chance to understand a director’s cut.

"The greatest thing about Writers’ Bloc is that nobody cares about the commission – it’s not to write for the 1,000-seater, but the freedom to write about what you want to," said Patel. At the festival run at Prithvi Theatre and later at the NCPA, expect free open workshops on topics like adaptation and directing new writing, and copies of Writers’ Bloc’s first published collection of plays. Time Out caught up with six of the promising playwrights.

Abhishek Majumdar

Who: Artistic director of the Indian Ensemble, Bangalore; won the 2008 Hindu MetroPlus Playwright Award.

What:The Djinns of Eidgah, about two children trying to deal with the harsh realities of Kashmir.

Writer’s take: "I’ve always written out of instinct rather than any training. My craft has really improved in terms of being technically better at the British model of playwriting which relies particularly on dramatic turn in the text. I formed some very important relationships with these writers. A lot of ideas developed through conversations with them. It was very interesting to see how a Marathi writer in Pune writes very differently from a Hindi writer in Bombay or an English writer sitting in Delhi or Bangalore, but they’re all compelling."

Annie Zaidi

Who: A published author in nonfiction, fiction and poetry; won the first prize for poetry at the 2011 Prakriti festival.

What: Jaal, about a policeman on a quest for a missing engineer.

Writer’s take: "I had been looking for a couple of years for somebody who would help train and give feedback. Writers' Bloc seemed ideal because it’s much more practical and hands-on. I write in other genres and I don’t work with actors or come from a theatre background, so it helped me firstly by establishing what dramatic writing requires. It reminded me of things you know instinctively are right but tend to forget; for instance, in any kind of writing, you’ve got to know your characters’ world. When I was sitting in the workshop, I couldn’t crack my first play, but because I was using all the exercises and tools they gave us for characters, I suddenly figured out the problem with a novella where I was feeling a bit stuck.

"Jaal was my second play for the Bloc. The writing of Jaal was a very careful construct; there was no attempt to distract from the primary story. I’d thought the earlier draft was working until the moment the actors came in. The biggest learning was that you have to actor-proof your text, you cannot write a text that works only under xyz conditions."

Ayeesha Menon

Who: A frequent playwright for BBC Radio 4; twice-recipient of the Sony Radio Academy Awards, UK.

What: Pereira’s Bakery on 76 Chapel Road, about a baker who protests the demolition of his chawl.

Writer’s take: "It was really helpful to get views of not just experts from England who’ve studied writing and theory but to get the other writers’ opinions. All of them came from different backgrounds, and had different questions that really strengthened the play. I had two plays I wanted to do; one was set
in a Catholic community like the one I grew up in and the other thought was about this building being demolished. It never occurred to me [to combine the stories until] a writer suggested it.

"Also, I was writing for Bombay and the Royal Court’s perspective was very international and that’s why I saw the bigger picture when they came in. I think all the writers have felt at different points in their life that their scripts have been taken over. The reason why this festival is fantastic is that we’re putting the writer first even in the rehearsals. All the directors the writers have been working with have been really respectful to our texts and it’s really wonderful to have a festival for writers for a change."

Irawati Karnik

Who: A playwright, director and actor; won the 2008 Sangeet Natak Akademi youth award.

What: Satellite City, about a de-addiction group for television junkies.

Writer’s take: "It’s my first English play. With Writers’ Bloc you get the initial platform you need to get a play noticed so that it can sustain later. I’d helped with translation of Marathi plays into English when I participated in the last Writers' Bloc. I had not gone to participate but while translating the work of four playwrights at this workshop, I wondered if I could write a play while I was there. At the first draft we read at the workshop together, most felt that the world it talks about seems to come alive in English and Hindi more than it would in Marathi. It’s been a very exciting experience because the Marathi theatre world is a very small space. This time a completely new set of people are even handling the material I’ve written.

"There was one aspect in which their approach seemed to differ a lot – they encourage a minimalist sparse writing which is almost not possible in Marathi or Hindi. Marathi is slightly explanatory, not spoken in such a staccato way. They make a lot of tools available to you, and over the years you decide what you want from that process."

Neel Chaudhuri

Who: Artistic director of Tadpole Repertory, Delhi; recipient of a 2009 Toto Funds the Arts award and the 2010 Hindu MetroPlus Playwright Award.

What: Still and Still Moving, a love story in Delhi.

Writer’s take: "A lot of my work is developed through a workshop process but mostly with actors. This was the first time that there was feedback from your fellow playwrights, mentors from the Royal Court Theatre, feedback from Rage and also from directors who come and read your script so it’s all really rich, both intimidating and exciting – you get so much perspective on the play that it generates a lot of possibility for where you can take it.

"Early on, I wrote something that was much milder and more elusive and over the workshop it’s fleshed out. The first time it was read aloud in the workshop, a lot of things I was uncertain about seemed to have worked for a lot of people so that reading was really an eye-opener for me."

Sagar Deshmukh

Who: A lawyer; an actor, writer and technician with Pune’s Aasakta Kalamanch.

What: Shillak, about a middle-class family’s struggle with retrenchment.

Writer’s take: "I had the concept of this play for some time, but somehow couldn’t express exactly what I wanted to do with it. In my first draft I think I was stuck in the form, about writing in this particular fashion. But after the exercises and Carl’s help, I find that I’ve been able to give the people in the play more flesh and blood. The draft that I have right now is more satisfying. I feel there are some loopholes but those can be sorted out easily with the actors and the director right there while actually working together.

"Perhaps a hitch was that everyone there was English-speaking and my play was about an extremely lower-middle-class situation so when they enacted it in English, at some point I felt it had become foreign and distant. But, even then, through the manner in which Rajit and Shernaz were improvising my scene, I realised that the images in my head were often completely the opposite of what the actors improvised. The moments that they were capturing were through the images in their head and through their own sensibilities. I was delighted to see how different mine and their reactions and images were. So in my next draft I’ve tried to write in such a way that I can again go into the unknown and it can become an enjoyable exploration."