Staging Objects: Exploring the life of theatrical props

The simplest definition of a prop is also the most radical. Andrew Sofer, in his landmark study The Stage Life of Props, tells us that a prop is not something an object is—it is something an object becomes. That small distinction opens up an enormous question: what does it take for an ordinary thing to cross the threshold into theatrical life? And what happens to it once it does? That crossing from ordinary thing to theatrical sign is what the fourth edition of Intersections: Theatre invites us to think about.

Drawn across practises, the curatorial thread observes the shared intent of the modernist visual artists in Bengal engaged in the act of making objects speak with sensitivity and purpose through painting, sculpting, and designing for the stage. They were not just peripheral contributors but active makers within the theatrical spaces they inhabited. Structured around this fascination, alongside the evolution of theatrical prop traditions, the pedagogical stakes of objects in children's theatre, and the collective energy of the backstage—the three sessions spanned across two days: a lecture, a participatory exercise, and a performance.

Ramendranath Chakravorty, Untitled (Chitrangada series), Coloured linocut on paper, 8.7 x 8.7 in. Collection: DAG

The history of theatre is shaped by culture, politics, aesthetics, and the body of the performer standing in relation to the object. To trace them is to discover that the prop is not a stable category—it is a site of contestation, transformation, and sometimes deliberate refusal.

Sofer built his argument against the semiotic tradition that dominated twentieth-century theatre studies, which reduced props to abstract signifiers, stripping them of material life and turning objects in motion into static metaphors. For Sofer, meaning is made through movement—the prop travels through a play, through time, through actors' hands, forging a temporal relationship with the audience: a promise, a foreboding, an accumulating expectation. His most striking case is Chekhov's gun: where the popular anecdote goes that if a gun is introduced in the first act it must be fired by the final one. The prop is never innocent; it generates suspense not through representation, but through its sheer material presence.

Travel east, and the picture tends to shift.

The Natyashastra, the ancient Sanskrit treatise on performance attributed to Bharata Muni composed somewhere between 200 BCE and 200 CE places objects within a category it calls aharya abhinaya the external dimension of acting, which encompasses costume, makeup, and stage design. But crucially, the Natyashastra is explicit that weapons on stage must never actually function as weapons. They should only touch, only gesture. A missile must not be released. A sword must not pierce. The object exists as pure sign and the body of the performer remains the primary carrier of meaning. In the Sanskrit tradition, and in the classical forms that descended from it—Kathakali, Kuchipudi, Odissi—the body does what Western theatre assigns to the prop. A chariot is not brought on stage. The actor's body becomes the chariot.

This is not a limitation. Rather, a philosophical position about where theatrical meaning lives.

F. B. Solvyns, Horry-Seng-Karten [Hari sankirtan, Vaishnavite songs], Vol I/ No. III/ Plate 1, Coloured Etching, 1808, 36 x 49 in. Collection: DAG

In the folk forms of the subcontinent too, something different takes place. The Chhau mask of Purulia does not represent a deity—it invites one. The performer who dons it is understood to undergo a transformation, not a performance. The object, instead of becoming a sign, takes the form of a vessel. Similarly, in Theyyam, the elaborate costume and painted body are the conditions for divine presence: they carry the sacred. The boundary between prop and ritual object, between theatre and ceremony, dissolves.

In jatra (the word itself means: going, procession, travel)—the most vital of Bengali folk theatre traditions, rooted in the Bhakti movement of the sixteenth century and the devotional processions of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (where devotees moved through the streets and fields singing kirtan, enacting scenes from Krishna's life as they walked)—the founding condition was precisely the absence of the fixed stage and a prop. There was no distinction between the space of performance and the space of living.

The stage was seen as a neutral stage and was bare to become anything the performance demands. Rather than the object being a 'time machine' in Sofer's sense, it is a placeholder, infinitely re-assignable, whose meaning comes from the performer's relationship to it rather than from its material presence. One chair is a throne, a mountain, a chariot; a dhunuchi (incense burner) is assigned to invoke its sacral significance. The object, when it does appear and disappear, carries extraordinary weight. The empty stage was not seen as lacking in meaning, but as a metaphorical setting: meaning lives in the space between the performer and the community gathered around them, not in the object placed between them.

This matters immensely for how we understand the prop in the Indian theatrical imagination. Contra Sofer’s contention, the performer's body, voice, and gesture carry what is usually assigned to the object. Sofer's prop-as-sign presupposes a spectator trained to read objects. Jatra's spectator is trained to imagine through their absence. When elaborate props entered the jatra stage through contact with Western theatre in the late-nineteenth century, what entered were objects of spectacle and a new theory of how theatrical meaning is produced and consumed.

The connection between the visual image and the theatrical object in Bengal was consciously explored by the Tagore family of Jorasanko)—where Gaganendranath Tagore understood that props could function as weapons of another kind. In his satirical caricatures and props, including crowns, ledgers, and ceremonial objects—they become weapons of satire, exposing the gap between social pretence and actual character. Here the prop escapes the stage entirely and enters political life through the visual grammar of theatre. Rabindranath Tagore arrived at the prop through the world itself, rather than through theatrical convention. He encountered a red oleander plant crushed beneath discarded iron in a scrapyard while walking, and watched as, days later, a single red flower pushed through the debris. That image became Raktakarabi (Red Oleanders), written in 1923)—whose Bengali version was staged only once in his lifetime, at Jorasanko.

The first principal of Kala Bhavana appointed by Tagore, artist and pedagogue Nandalal Bose was deeply involved in set design, costumes, and props as part of the curriculum at Santiniketan. He had been a constant production visualiser for Tagore’s plays for the young—and his most notable work was seen in productions of Natir Puja, Phalguni (including a scroll painting), Chitrangada, Taasher Desh (costumes), and Bisarjan.

The tension between presence and absence, between the material and the gestural, found its most charged expression in the Bengali Group Theatre movement of the twentieth century. In 1943, as the Bengal famine killed millions and colonial administration looked away, a generation of artists turned the image into an instrument of witnessing. Chittaprosad, active in the cultural wing of the Communist Party and its theatre association, the Indian People’s Theatre Association (I. P. T. A.) was sent to famine-stricken Midnapur in November 1943 to document what he found. He designed costumes for Bijan Bhattacharya's landmark I. P. T. A. production Nabanna (The New Harvest) in 1944, that brought the famine onto the stage—while simultaneously filling his drawings with objects of deprivation: empty vessels, skeletal hands, the bare ground where food should have been. For Chittaprosad, painting was a weapon; as he put it: ‘I was forced by circumstances to turn my brush into as sharp a weapon as I could make it.’ The objects in his work do not generate narrative suspense. They are accusations.

The objects on stage in Nabanna, such as the empty cooking pot, the harvested field, the absence of rice–were indices of what was happening beyond the theatre walls. The prop, here, collapsed the distance between stage and world.

Utpal Dutt, who had co-directed Nabanna and later built his revolutionary theatre at the People's Little Theatre, understood this collapse as both political necessity and theatrical method. His staging of Kallol in 1965—about the Royal Indian Naval Mutiny of 1946— brought the props of state power onto the proscenium stage: weapons, uniforms, the flags of colonial authority. These were objects that had, in the world, functioned as instruments of oppression. Dutt's epic stage, dominated by a large ship which was the set itself, had the objects turn into things of contestation, dramatic conflict, and political argument.

Scholar Trina Nileena Banerjee's introductory lecture wove theoretical and material explorations of how props express meaning on stage. Her case studies ranged from Nabanna's bamboo sticks — whose clashing became the sound of guns, to the monumental ship in Kallol that moved from the Minerva stage to the Maidan, becoming provisional architecture for a million people. The session asked us to see props as ghosted by history, and drew on Peirce's three categories—icon, index, and symbol—as a framework for understanding how props can generate meaning through resemblance, causal connection, or social convention.

Trina Nileena Banerjee lays out the historically shifting roles played by props on the Bengali stage. Photographer: Anirudha Das
Image courtesy: DAG

In the decades that followed, as Bengali theatre drew on earlier traditions of radicalism and popular entertainment, the treatment of stage objects became a way of negotiating questions of power. Between Badal Sircar’s rejection of props and the formal proscenium, and Utpal Dutt’s epic-theatre visual language—where stage objects were shaped by myth and political history—both practitioners, addressing mass audiences and committed to political transformation, foreground how theatre asks: whom does it speak for, to whom, and what role do objects, or their absence, play within that address?

After the 1960s, Chittaprosad’s Khelaghar project with Raghunath Goswami and Czech puppeteer Frantisek Salaba presents a thread worth pursuing: a peace-oriented initiative for slum children in Bombay that signals a striking shift from his earlier, intensely political, commissioned work. Photographs from the DAG archive from this period stand in sharp contrast to the years before and after Nabanna, when his brush and ideology operated as weapons of political urgency. And yet, a continuity persisted in the act of collective making and play—a form of solidarity and repair.

This pedagogical potential of prop-making was put to the test in a participatory exercise—the second session in the series—designed to render theory legible through practice. Transforming a black box into a theatre’s backstage, participants worked with Leela Majumdar’s visually rich short story Diner Sheshe (The Long Day Closes), narrated by theatrist Santanil Ganguly. They annotated objects within the text, formed mock theatre-worker groups, and collectively devised props through improvisation, guided by members of the theatre group Jhalapala.

In the process, Trina’s framework became palpable in the room: participants found themselves asking whether a prop must resemble its referent to function iconically, or it might instead point toward it indexically, or whether a shared agreement alone could sustain it as a symbol. While a material library occupied one corner of the space, it was non-prescriptive. Readymades were remixed and constraints were embraced. Each group arrived at a familiar insight of theatre practice—that the most effective props are rarely found or purchased, but emerge through argument, imagination, and the pressure of a deadline.

Santanil Ganguly reads the Leela Majumdar story that becmae the basis for the prop-making exercise that followed. Photographer: Anirudha Das
Image courtesy: DAG

The show-and-tell that followed was genuinely exciting—plants, costumes, accessories, gears, special effect props, and some truly eccentric suggestions emerged. The script, actor, and prop were conceived simultaneously—some visible on stage, some permanently in the background, all equally constitutive of what the audience finally sees. It blurred the boundaries between prop categories much as many hybrid Indian productions do, with a quiet theatrical and political takeaway: that all elements of the stage is a collective labour, and the prop is its most material evidence.

Two shows of Jhalapala's Leela-r Bondhu (Leela’s Friend), which closed the programme on the second day, was the performative footnote visually resolving the questions which the edition has been sitting with. Conceptualised and directed by Santanil Ganguly in the black box at Padatik Theatre, the audience was seated on a raised platform while the suggestive gestures and crafted objects unfurled on the floor below—quite literally the view from above that grown-ups have of children. Based on R.K. Narayan's eponymous short story, the hand-made props with two young characters both enacted by adults took the audience to Leela’s world of memories, woven through stories of Garbeta, the river Shilavati, and her first friend Sidda, until the adult world casts its shadow compelling her to pack it all away.

A scene from the play Leela'r Bondhu (Leela's Friend), staged by Jhalapala. Photographer: Anirudha Das
Image courtesy: DAG

Across two days, this edition of Intersections: Theatre kept returning to the tension between the stubborn insistence of the object and the multiplicity of its meanings across cultures. It is precisely that tension which gives the prop its charge. The sessions moved between theory and practice, backstage and staging—through questions of material choice, collective labour, and the politics embedded in who makes and handles an object. The prop, it turns out, is never incidental nor passive. It is where some of theatre's most urgent questions live.

Props on stage for Jhalapala's production of Leela'r Bondhu (Leela's Friend). Photographer: Anirudha Das Image courtesy: DAG