Q1.
I. Read the beginning of a story given below.
Anuradha, a teenager, has been learning tabla at school since her primary years and is an extraordinary tabla player. Her father, a vocalist, is a music teacher in a school. He has never been supportive of her learning the tabla and rather feels she should focus on becoming a vocalist. She has been invited to perform at a prestigious event, and decides to participate in it, despite her father’s disapproval. However, Anuradha’s mother and brother have always rooted for her. Anuradha sat wondering.
In groups of four, create a play script based only on the beginning of the story given above. To write the script, you may refer to the play you have just read.
Answer
This is a group writing task, so what follows is a method, a checklist, and one model scene you can adapt — not a script to copy.
What a good script must contain (the book’s own tips):
- Write a rough draft first; a script is rewritten more than it is written.
- Open with the setting and characters, exactly as Twin Melodies does.
- Use a colon after the speaker’s name. No inverted commas — everything on the page after the colon is speech.
- Use brackets for the manner of delivery and for actions: (firmly), (picking up the tabla bag). These words are not spoken aloud.
- Include an aside where a character’s private thought is needed.
- Use non-lexical fillers — Ahem-ahem!, Arrghh!, Hmmm — to make the speech sound real.
- Use an ellipsis (…) for a short pause: “Yes, actually I … er … was finding the right words.”
How to plan it in four steps, dividing the work between four writers:
- Fix the conflict in one sentence — ‘Anuradha wants to play the tabla at a prestigious event; her father wants a vocalist for a daughter.’ Everything in the script must serve that sentence.
- Give each character one clear want. Father: to protect what he thinks is the family’s real art. Anuradha: to play the invitation without lying. Mother and brother: to get the two to talk. Characters who want nothing have nothing to say.
- Build it in three short scenes — the news; the refusal; the performance or the reconciliation. Three scenes is the shape of Twin Melodies, and it is enough.
- Do not let anyone win by speech. In the play you have read, the father is not argued into changing his mind; he is changed by hearing the music. Find your own equivalent moment — the father overhearing her practise, or recognising his own composition in her taal.
Sample answer (opening scene of the script):
ANURADHA’S TABLA
Characters
Anuradha : a teenaged tabla player
Suresh Rao : her father, a vocalist and school music teacher
Kamala : her mother
Rohan : her younger brother
SCENE I
The front room of the Rao house, early evening. A harmonium sits on a low table under a photograph of a veena. Anuradha is at the doorway with a printed invitation in her hand. Rohan is doing homework on the floor. Kamala comes in from the kitchen, wiping her hands.
Anuradha: (Aside) Three years I have waited for a letter like this … and now I cannot even put it on the table.
Rohan: (without looking up) You have been standing at that door for five minutes. Is it the invitation?
Anuradha: (quickly folding it) It’s nothing. Ahem-ahem. Just a school circular.
Kamala: (taking the paper gently from her) A circular that you have folded four times? (reads, then looks up) The Sangeet Sabha, Anu. On the twenty-first.
Rohan: (jumping up) Arrghh! Say something, both of you! She has been invited to play!
Anuradha: Which is exactly the problem. Papa will hear ‘tabla’ and stop listening after that word.
Kamala: (sitting down beside her) Then do not begin with the word. Begin with the invitation.
Suresh enters with a bundle of notebooks. Silence.
Suresh: (setting the notebooks down, evenly) A house this quiet has usually just been talking about me.
Anuradha: Papa, I … er … there is something I have to tell you, and I would like to finish the whole sentence before you answer.
Suresh: (sitting, formally) Hmmm. Finish it, then.
CURTAIN
Characters
Anuradha : a teenaged tabla player
Suresh Rao : her father, a vocalist and school music teacher
Kamala : her mother
Rohan : her younger brother
SCENE I
The front room of the Rao house, early evening. A harmonium sits on a low table under a photograph of a veena. Anuradha is at the doorway with a printed invitation in her hand. Rohan is doing homework on the floor. Kamala comes in from the kitchen, wiping her hands.
Anuradha: (Aside) Three years I have waited for a letter like this … and now I cannot even put it on the table.
Rohan: (without looking up) You have been standing at that door for five minutes. Is it the invitation?
Anuradha: (quickly folding it) It’s nothing. Ahem-ahem. Just a school circular.
Kamala: (taking the paper gently from her) A circular that you have folded four times? (reads, then looks up) The Sangeet Sabha, Anu. On the twenty-first.
Rohan: (jumping up) Arrghh! Say something, both of you! She has been invited to play!
Anuradha: Which is exactly the problem. Papa will hear ‘tabla’ and stop listening after that word.
Kamala: (sitting down beside her) Then do not begin with the word. Begin with the invitation.
Suresh enters with a bundle of notebooks. Silence.
Suresh: (setting the notebooks down, evenly) A house this quiet has usually just been talking about me.
Anuradha: Papa, I … er … there is something I have to tell you, and I would like to finish the whole sentence before you answer.
Suresh: (sitting, formally) Hmmm. Finish it, then.
CURTAIN
Tip: notice what the sample borrows from Twin Melodies — an aside that lets the audience in first, a stage direction that gives the father a formal way of sitting, an ellipsis in the daughter’s nervous sentence, and an ending that stops just before the answer. Borrow the techniques, not the words.