Camden People’s Theatre’s SPRINT Festival returns with a packed programme throughout March. London’s “best-established carnival of new and unusual theatre” features artists with bold ideas, artists who don’t play by the rules, and artists, in many instances, making their first professional work.
This is the seventeenth of a series of interviews highlighting artists and work within the Festival, as I chat with writer/director Anuj Deshpande about his WIP show, Dear Azaadi.
A poet is accused of inciting violence. A singer goes on a hunger strike behind bars. A trial waiting to start. A self-exiled comrade travels across time to excavate the meanings of freedom. An entire country erupts against a repressive law. It could be 1919. It could be today.
Drawing from prison writings, letters, court statements, poetry, songs and moving images, the performance asks how freedom is imagined under constraint, and how captivity–whether we want it or not, continues to shape the psychic and political landscapes of those of us who consider ourselves free. While the performance focuses on the lives, and dreams of such prisoners from India, it places them in conversation with prisoners across space and time for whom freedom has been most violently withheld, to quietly turn the gaze back towards free selves.
Where: Camden People’s Theatre
When: 26 Mar, 7.15pm
Ticket link: https://cptheatre.co.uk/whatson/Dear-Azaadi
Your show Dear Azaadi is showing at the Sprint Festival as a work in progress – what can you tell us about it?
Dear Azaadi is a docu-fiction performance based on the writings of political prisoners. With a focus on such prisoners from India, the show places them in conversation with prisoners across space and time through fictional journal entries of someone who is in a sort of forced exile.
These brief, intimate reflections are then interspersed with actual prison writings of some of the young, brave and committed activists of contemporary India who are imprisoned under draconian laws. It is also an attempt to document and to remember the lives in captivity.
Audiences can expect a blending of dramatized prison accounts, poetry, moving images and archive material.
You draw on real testimony and interviews to build the play. Was this always your intention from the start?
Yes, pretty much. There is a real force to words written by the wrongfully incarcerated activists, I feel. They are sensitive, political minds resisting everyday dehumanization. They made me question a lot of things that I took for granted. And that’s why I wanted to frame these testimonies more creatively so that they don’t evoke only a tragic response but make us see our so-called freedom in a new light.
After Jigisha, my co-writer, who’s working on prison experiences in South Asia as part of her PhD, joined us, there was new material and a certain perspective that she brought and then connections started forming, and a loose narrative took shape. She’s already been responding to the material creatively, so we’re trying to include that as well. So it’s a collage of letters, spoken-word monologues and legal insights into the (colonial) origins of laws that label dissent as ‘terrorism‘.
But there is an immense amount of literature and documents produced on or in prisons, even if only from India and the more I am diving deep into it, I am unearthing a lot of stuff about prison experiences in India across time, the absurdities, and arbitrariness embedded in how Indian prisons work and what it means to resist in the darkest times and places. The project has evolved a lot, and it will keep evolving after this show.
How did Drift Theatre get started?
Honestly, it started out of a need for a name and an urge to do something on my own, under my own theatre company, but mainly on my own terms. (I am sure, I am not the only one to feel that).
I just finished a postgrad in scriptwriting in a drama school and it was definitely an enriching experience but in this landscape of waiting endlessly for big opportunities, I was craving a return to small-scale DIY theatre – the kind I did for a few years in India before moving here – where I could bring together a group of people I genuinely want to work with (and I’ve been very lucky in that regard) and create something that feels important and interesting, something I’d actually want to see as an audience member.
There are already few opportunities for migrant artists, and even less for this kind of DIY theatre, so when CPT announced SPRINT 2026, it just felt like the right time and place to kick start this venture. But through this, my aim is to keep making experimental DIY theatre that brings urgent, relevant issues relating to India and beyond to the UK audiences.
What do you think freedom looks like, and what message would you like your audience to take away?
I think it is negotiated every day, and there’s no singular, absolute meaning. In the words of Jigisha, my co-writer, this piece treats it as ‘unstable and unfinished and a longing, a responsibility, a practice’.
But whatever little I have been reading by people who have survived (or not) or are going through the harshest conditions inside or outside jails, it’s not the grand, spectacular assertions but small, almost quietly defying gestures that have stood out or revealed something to me.
Undoubtedly, mass movements help us win our rights and freedoms, but my attempt through this show is to look at and give a voice to the individuals in those movements who are isolated and how they cope with that and the daily struggles, harassments, surveillances they navigate in a carceral system that is sadistic and under acolonial hangover.
I don’t know what message the audience can take as it is too early to say that, but if these things come across well theatrically, then I’d be happy with that.
What’s next for the show after SPRINT?
We’ve been awarded a grant by the Faculty of English at Cambridge, so we’ll be doing another WIP showcase at their Judith Wilson Drama Studio sometime in late spring.
Hopefully, a proper full-fledged production will be soon if we have the means and support, considering all the feedback after these shows. Besides, I have been developing a couple of writing projects on the side, too. But that’s how far I am planning.