Tibetan Play in the West End

Abhishek Majumdar's play Pah-La is now showing at the Royal Court Theatre, London.

Last year, he faced censure when Pah-La, his drama about Tibetans caught up in the Lhasa riots of 2008, was put on ice by the Royal Court, with charges that the Beijing authorities had weighed in and the theatre’s writing programme in China could have been jeopardised if the play went ahead.

The theatre issued an apology to the Tibetan community, he explains, sitting in the venue’s cafe, and it is now about to stage Pah-La. “The leadership at the Royal Court was extraordinary in accepting problems that were larger than them and then doing something about it.”

The play will still, probably, ruffle some feathers. Set among a monastic circle of Tibetans, the drama shows their forced assimilation and interrogation at the hands of the Chinese army, but it also dramatises the controversial practice of self-immolation among Tibetan protestors (a woman sets herself alight in his play) and the faultlines between non-violent Buddhist ideals and the all-too-human descent into retaliatory violence that the 2008 riots encapsulated.

That led him to explore the themes at the heart of Pah-La. “In the last century, there were so many major examples of non-violent revolutions, from Gandhi’s to Martin Luther King’s to Nelson Mandela’s. But if these are models to go by, what happened to them? They vanished after the 1970s.”
Tibet, he says, is the last remaining model for such non-violence. “The Tibetans are at the forefront of a conscience that the world needs to have. When the last Tibetan turns violent, we should pack up.”

Pah-La is at the Royal Court, London, until 27 April.