1950s
On her return from the United States, Prema Sastri worked with Ebrahim Alkazi and his theatre group as an actor, usher and understudy, and was greatly influenced by his work.
She was with Alkazi’s Unity Theatre, when the young Madhur and Saeed Jaffrey worked with him. Prema was very impressed with Zohra Sehgal, and quoted Sehgal saying: “Prema, I am going to London to make a new international career.”
When Sehgal achieved her dream, Prema resolved to never consider age as a barrier. She continued to write, direct and produce plays right to the last days of her life. At the age of 80, she wrote and directed short plays from her wheelchair for Raksha, the club for the wives of army officers, and the local church in Indiranagar, Bangalore.
After her work with Unity Theatre, she was selected to attend a workshop on script development and street theatre at the National School of Drama, set up by the Sahitya Kala Akademi and the Ministry of Arts in India.
1960s-1970s
Moving to Bangalore, she was the drama critic for Indian Express. She realised her love for theatre was greater than critiquing work by others.
She started her theatre work with the Bangalore Little Theatre and for over a decade, co-produced and directed plays before creating her own theatre company Kalidasa Theatres in the 1970s.
She produced and directed Shivaji and Gandhi that played to packed halls at Ravindra Kalakshetra, Bangalore’s largest theatre at the time.
1980s-1990s
Prema was the only person in the English language theatre to be chosen to attend a theatre workshop held by the British Council and run by Peter Brook, who was touring his production of the Mahabaratha in the Indian subcontinent.
She started writing radio plays. Changes, written for Feba (formerly known as FEBA Radio), was about the troubles and travails of a South Asian family. The pilot resulted in letters pouring in to the broadcaster and she went on to write 24 episodes for the channel.
In the mid 1990s, Robert Small, the director of her staged reading of Gandhi by the Pan Asian Repetory in New York, invited Prema as one of two international writers to attend the Shenandoah International Playwrights Retreat. A mother and wife first, Prema declined this prestigious offer.
2000-2017
When her husband passed away in 2000, Prema took a break from writing plays, only directing and acting in the local church’s Nativity plays every year as a comfort and solace. After nearly a decade, she wrote short 15-20 minute plays for the army-officers’ wives club, which she directed and produced right up to 2016, a year before she passed away.
Three-Act Plays
Shivaji
Written under the pen-name Lata Narain in the late 1960s through to the 1970s, the play was dedicated to Ebrahim Alkazi.
In 1975 The Chhatrapati Shivaji Coronation Tri-Centenary Celebrations Committee congratulated Prema for her literary contribution. She was invited to New Delhi by the Vice President of India, BD Jatti, who released the book at the inauguration ceremony and distributed 200 copies of the books to senior government officials.
Shivaji, the founder of the Maratha Empire, fascinated the author, as he was shaped and influenced by three key women – Sai and Soyra, two of his seven wives, and his mother Jijabai. She saw Shivaji as a “misfit amid the obsequious inanities of court life” – a reflection of her own life as her father worked as a senior advisor with the Nehru Government.
Gandhi – Man of the Millions
In the foreword to the play, Prema writes “To write a play on Gandhi is to invite criticism”. Having met the Indian freedom fighter when she was at the age of 10, she was impressed by his great sway over the millions of Indians who had gathered to hear him speak.
Prema focused on researching Gandhi and decided to write a play about the man and not the politician. The play, dedicated to Kasturba and Madeleine Slade (Mira Behn), once again shows her interest in the women who shaped the great men of Indian history.
Written in the late 1970s through the 1980s, the play was published by The Writers Workshop in 1989. In 1993, Harsh Nayyar ironically played Gandhi in a staged reading of the play in New York. Nayyar had made his career acting in Richard Attenborough’s film on Gandhi, in which he played Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Gandhi. Madhur Jaffrey, much to the author’s delight, played Kasturba.
Radio Plays
Across the Border
Originally titled The Dividing Line, this one-act play was written as a radio-drama. However, in the 1990s, the play was performed at The Watermans Arts Centre, in a festival of plays by South Asian writers. The director, Simon Nicholson, now an established writer in his own right, was at the time an award-winning graduate of Cambridge University. Nicholson worked with Prema and suggested modifications to the play as well as the title.
The play won Nicholson an award for best director, while the Akbar Kurtha won best actor. The Kiln Theatre, then known as the Tricycle Theatre, commissioned a double bill of Across The Border and Gandhi to be performed in London.
Changes
When FEBA and TAFTEE (The Association for Theological Education Extension) approached Prema to write a short play for the radio, she was using role-play in teaching communications and leadership. TAFTEE was looking for social issues that would encourage young leaders to make wise decisions. Many of these issues started in families.
Prema looked at key social issues with episodes titled Divorce, Teenage Struggle and Violence in the Family. Assertiveness, wisdom and compassion were some of the themes she explored in the process of decision-making and leadership.
“Can there be Unity in Decision Making at Home” and “How does a woman juggle work, home, husband and children” were some of the slogans by TAFTEE to market the series. Many of these slogans were issues close to the author’s own experiences. The producers of 24-episode series received several emotional letters and calls about how the imaginary worlds of the characters resonated with their audience.
