Therukoothu
தெருக்கூத்து
Also Street theatre, Kattaikkuttu.
Theatre Tamil Nadu
What it is
Therukoothu is the all night street theatre of the northern Tamil country, performed in the open at village festivals, mostly on the Mahabharata and above all on Draupadi. It is loud, long and funny as well as serious: a performance runs from about ten at night to dawn, with a clown who interrupts, songs, argument scenes and the audience sitting on the ground on three sides. It is the performance half of the Draupadi Amman cult, and in many villages the eighteen night cycle of the festival is a cycle of these plays.
How it is built
Performed on flat ground with no stage, no curtain beyond a hand held cloth, and a petromax or now an electric lamp. The costume is the kattai, wooden shoulder ornaments and a tall headdress, with heavy face makeup. The Kattiyakkaran, the clown and narrator, introduces the characters, explains the plot and mocks everybody including the audience and the organisers. The music is harmonium, mridangam and cymbals, and the actors sing their own lines. Male actors play the women’s roles in the traditional companies, though that has begun to change.
How it is learnt
The question a family actually has
Learnt by joining a company, usually in the early teens, and training through a season on the road. The Kattaikkuttu Gurukulam near Kanchipuram, founded in 1990, teaches it formally to boys and girls together, which no traditional company did, and runs it alongside school education. Training is in singing, speech projection without amplification, the footwork and the stamina for a night long performance. An actor who cannot be heard across an open field by a thousand people cannot work.
Whose lineage is whose
Where a claim is contested, by whom
The companies are family based and village based, many from the Vanniyar and other communities of the northern districts, and a company is known by its village and its lead actor. The form is tied to the Draupadi Amman temples and performs on their festival calendar. Rajagopal and Hanne de Bruin’s Kattaikkuttu Sangam has documented the tradition and trained a generation outside the hereditary families, including girls in women’s roles, which the older companies have met with a range of responses from support to refusal.
Worth knowing
The clown who runs the show
The Kattiyakkaran introduces each character as they enter, explains what is happening, asks the audience whether they are following, comments on the actors’ performances, makes jokes about the village headman who paid for the performance, and keeps the night moving when energy flags at three in the morning. He is not comic relief in the margins; he is the structural device that lets an eight hour performance keep a tired audience, and a company lives or dies on him.
Eighteen nights to one oath
In the Draupadi Amman festivals the plays are performed in sequence over eighteen nights, following the epic, and the whole arc is pointed at one moment: the night Bhima kills Dushasana and Draupadi binds her hair at last. Villagers come for particular nights and everybody comes for that one. The firewalk follows. A theatre whose eighteen night structure exists to deliver one oath being kept is a different thing from a repertory season, and the audience is participating in a rite rather than attending a play.
Where the regions differ
- Tamil
- Kerala
- Telugu
- Kannada
- North
- Maharashtra
- Bengal
- Punjab
- Assam
- Sri Lanka
- Nepal
- Gujarat
- Odisha
- Mithila
- Kashmir
- Tulu Nadu
- manipur
- rajasthan
- konkani
- sindhi
- jharkhand
- himalayan
- kodava
- Tamil Nadu
- Villupuram, Kanchipuram, Thiruvannamalai and Cuddalore are the heartland, performed at the Draupadi Amman festivals through the hot months.
- Andhra and Telangana
- The southern Andhra districts keep a related street theatre on the same epics and the same festival calendar.
Connected to
Deities
Festivals
Related arts