Playwright, theatre director and journalist Gowri Ramnarayan was unexpectedly pleased when 30 people turned up for her workshop titled, ‘Hands on: Write a Play’, at The Hindu Lit For Life on Sunday (January 18, 2026).
“I was surprised to see so many people interested in playwriting,” she said, calling theatre a “niche” in Chennai. Not many will read a play unless prescribed to them by a college curriculum or school syllabus, she pointed out.
The workshop’s attendees included engineers, teachers, theatre enthusiasts, and aspiring playwrights. It was truly a “mixed group”, noted Ms. Ramnarayan. “Even someone like me, who doesn’t know much about theatre, could understand,” said student attendee Angeline Anto.
‘Voice for the voiceless’
“Why do you want to write a play?” the playwright asked. Sunandan Dutta, 31, a robotics engineer based in Calcutta, answered: “My background is in technology, but I want to know how to write science into plays.” Other attendees noted that stories are simply better told through theatre due to its being such a direct form of storytelling.
Ms. Ramnarayan offered them simple but effective advice: “If you want to write a play, you need to read plays critically.”
She read them an excerpt from her own play, When Things Fall Apart, which she described as “a protest play.” It reinterprets an episode in the Mahabharata, proving that it is possible to talk about important current issues using a mythic story. “Theatre itself is rebellion,” she said to the attendees, “You are a voice for the voiceless.”
Show, not tell
Ms. Ramnarayan began the interactive session by making the important distinction between playwriting and fiction writing. The job of a playwright goes beyond the script, requiring them to pay attention to technical aspects like lighting, space, and how props might work.
“A play comes alive on the stage, not the page,” she emphasised. The writer must ask herself, “Where are the actors going to be?” Theatre is a medium that requires the playwright to visualise the stage and hone craft skills, an exercise that is as creative as it is intellectual, she said.
“Let’s look at how the ancients saw theatre,” she said, outlining the six Aristotelian rules of drama as well as Bharata’s concept of vyabichari bhava, or oscillating emotions. According to Ms. Ramnarayan, the key is not to narrate but rather to “show” how the characters feel. “The audience loves a challenge,” she said. This principle of showing rather than telling of emotion was then practiced through an exercise that asked attendees to take classic fables and turn them into dialogues, revealing the nuanced emotion in age-old stories.
