Man who made Tamil theatre avant-garde

Chennai: In the 1970s, when Tamil theatre was all about dialogue, N Muthuswamy decided to make his move — in more ways than one. The playwright incorporated gestures and movements of classical and folk dance and traditional martial arts into his productions, creating an alternate movement in Tamil theatre. Muthuswamy breathed his last on Wednesday at 11.30am at his home in Chennai but the avant-garde language that he created will stay on through his theatre group Koothu-P-Pattarai.
The 82-year-old, survived by his wife and two sons and a daughter, suddenly felt short of breath and developed chest pain, he died soon after.
A short story writer, Muthuswamy, who was born in Punjai in Thanjavur district, decided to write plays after he was dazzled by the richness of the folk theatre format of therukoothu. His plays were first published in magazines such as ‘Nadai’ but it was after he established the theatre training institution Koothu-P-Pattarai (meaning complete theatre) in 1977 that they began to be staged. "The performance would come alive, the experience was immersive. This was revolutionary at a time when theatre was all about hour-long monologues," says artist P Krishnamurthi, his long-time friend. "Today we have lost one of the finest Tamil playwrights."
The theatre group incorporated traditional folk theatre and modernist interpretation. And through it Muthuswamy created a platform for a fresh artistic experience that explored existential crisis and political identities. His first play ‘Kalamkalamaaka’ in 1969, was followed by other seminal productions such as ‘Narkalikkararin’ and ‘Suvarottikal’.
It was his quest to create an environment for younger artists that set him apart. Koothu-P-Pattarai, says actor Kalai, who was among his first batch of students, was not just a centre of learning, but a space for those interested in theatre. "He would feed his students, give rooms to stay, care for them when they were ill and pay them salaries. He wanted theatre to flourish. He wanted his actors to be invested in it," says Kalai, who with the theatre group for 20 years before she got into movies. Many of Muthuswamy’s students — from Pasupathy to Vijay Sethupathy — have gone on to make a mark in cinema. The rigorous training and free-flowing curriculum of his theatre group created a distinct style of natural acting, which directors now look for.
Muthuswamy’s perspective of theatre was all-encompassing. He would take his students to watch therukoothu performances in villages, and to temples to study the body language of sculptures, insisting they read works of playwrights from around the world, and experiment with movement and emotion. Describing his plays, Krishnamurthi says, "His plays had a surreal feel and yet had a very human touch. ‘Suvarottikal’, which I directed, was about the culture of wall posters, and was so abstract that I directed it in three different ways," says Krishnamurthi.
Supporting the arts came to him naturally, says M D Muthukumaraswamy, director of the National Folk Lore Support Centre. "When I was a student, Muthuswamy took me to a therakoothu performance. It was the reason I dedicated my life to folklore," says Muthukumaraswamy. "He impacted more lives than he knew he did."