The flotsam and jetsam of the latest European thought are eagerly sought and treasured up,” reported Vanity Fair of 1880s Shimla, “one must speak of nothing but the latest doings at the Gaiety, the pictures at the last Academy...” The Raj, summers in Shimla, chintz tablecloths and lace doilies, amateur dramatics at the Gaiety Theatre: all these are bound together inescapably. With their greatest chronicler, Rudyard Kipling, who, according to the playbills from the first season in 1887, “appeared as Birsemouche, a landed proprietor and naturalist” in Sardou’s A Scrap of Paper. Kipling himself accused a character of “an unhingment of spirits which might have led to eccentricities” because of “six consecutive days” of rehearsal at the “new Gaiety Theatre, where the plaster is not yet properly dry.”

The plaster is drying again on the Gaiety Theatre renewed. After six years of renovation, it opened on Thursday; reviews are favourable. And its long journey from the heart of the genteel, racially exclusive Mall to the home of an art gallery, a museum, a multi-purpose hall and an amphitheatre in a bustling, crowded modern city is worth noting. Founded, among other reasons, to safeguard the intellectual property of London dramatists, it used to take in enormous sums —

Rs 10,000 a night, sometimes — and, in 1896, produced as many as 29 plays. But it fell on hard times in the 1960s; only one play was produced that entire decade, even though it had been thrown open to Hindustani theatre as early as 1928.

... contd.