Opening Nights

And yet these are the nights we remember. Not the plays, in some cases — almost nobody alive has seen Nijinsky's choreography, and more people can quote the first word of Ubu Roi than can tell you what happens after it. What we remember is the noise. The young men with red tickets in the Comédie-Française. The bad word with an extra letter in it. The Dublin audience that stopped a play cold over an item of underwear. The man in Paris who, according to a critic, beat time on another man's head.

Every one of these is a story about an audience that thought it was defending something. A rule of French verse. A national idea of the Irish country girl. The dignity of a statesman dead for more than a century and a half. The defence is always sincere, and it is almost never about what it says it is about.

Indian readers know the rhythm of this better than most. Every year brings its film, its book, its play, its hurt sentiment, its burnt poster outside a theatre, and it is tempting to think of this as something we invented. We did not. The five nights in this Feature run from Paris in 1830 to Pune in 1972, and the fights in them are startlingly alike — the organised claque, the pre-booked hecklers, the police at the door, the announcement before curtain that no offence was intended.

What is less alike is the telling. Look closely and nearly every legendary opening night turns out to have been written up years later, by someone who was on the winning side. Gautier described the battle of Hernani four decades after he fought it. Yeats wrote down his night at Ubu Roi in a memoir a quarter of a century on. The word "riot" did not attach itself to The Rite of Spring until 1924. And the most vivid account of Ghashiram Kotwal's troubles was given by a politician, from a stage, fifty years after the fact.

The five nights run in order. Paris in 1830, where a few hundred young men with red tickets waited most of a day to defend a line of verse that would not stop where it was supposed to. Paris again in 1896, where a twenty-three-year-old opened his play with a rude word and an Irish poet who could barely follow the French went home and prophesied the twentieth century. Dublin in 1907, where a national theatre's own audience stopped a play at the mention of a slip. Paris once more in 1913, at the most famous riot in the history of the arts — which, on the evidence, may not have been one. And Pune in 1972, where the fight over a play took place almost entirely outside the theatre, on the road, and ended with a borrowed aeroplane.

So this is a Feature about five premieres, and the five people — or six, or seven — who decided what those premieres had been.

A riot is not something that happens in a theatre. It is something that gets remembered about one.

It is Spanish. It means iron. Victor Hugo had them printed for the people he trusted — painters, poets, students, architecture apprentices, the long-haired young of Paris who had decided, somewhere in the late 1820s, that French theatre was dead and that he was the man to dig it up. On the evening of 25 February 1830 they carried those red squares into the Comédie-Française for the first night of Hernani, ou l'Honneur castillan. Hugo was twenty-seven. He would turn twenty-eight the next day.

They arrived early. Very early. Théophile Gautier, who was eighteen and among them, remembered being let in hours before curtain and shut up in the half-dark of a theatre with nothing to do. The prudent ones, he wrote, had brought chocolate and bread rolls — du chocolat et des petits pains. Others brought sausages, and the classicists who arrived later in the evening complained that the whole house smelled of garlic. To pass the time the young men sang Hugo's ballads, did animal impressions, and generally behaved like an army that has been told the battle is at dawn and has turned up the night before.

Hugo had been spoiling for this fight for three years. In 1827 he had published the preface to Cromwell, an unstageable verse drama with a preface that was very much meant to be staged — a long, loud declaration that the rules of classical tragedy were a cage, that the grotesque and the sublime belonged on the same stage, that Shakespeare had been right and Racine's heirs were wrong. Then, in 1829, he wrote Marion de Lorme, and the censors of King Charles X forbade it. Hernani was the play that got through. Everyone on both sides of the house knew it was the first real test of whether the preface could survive contact with an audience.

The play itself is a Spanish honour tragedy, gloriously overheated. Hernani is an outlaw, a nobleman in disguise, in love with Doña Sol. So is the young king, Don Carlos. So, unfortunately, is her elderly guardian and fiancé, Don Ruy Gómez, to whom Hernani at one point pledges his life in exchange for a favour, handing over a hunting horn — when the old man blows it, Hernani must die. In the last act, on his wedding night, the horn sounds. It is the kind of plot that operas are made of, which is exactly what happened to it.

What were they there to fight for?

Not a cause, exactly. A line break.

French tragedy in 1830 still ran on the alexandrine — twelve syllables, a rhyme, and, crucially, a full stop where the line ended. The sentence and the verse were supposed to finish together, the way a well-drilled regiment halts on a single beat. Racine did it. Corneille did it. The Comédie-Française had been doing it for a century and a half and saw no reason to stop. The audience that turned up in evening dress that February knew the rules the way a Carnatic rasika knows a tala — not as theory, but in the body.

And Hugo opened his play by breaking the rule in the first two lines.

Serait-ce déjà lui? — C'est bien à l'escalier
Dérobé.

A servant, Doña Josefa, hears a knock and wonders who is at the hidden staircase — and the word dérobé, hidden, spills over the edge of the first line and lands alone at the start of the second. An enjambment. In English it barely registers. In the Comédie-Française in 1830 it was the equivalent of an actor walking on and spitting on the stage.

Gautier, years later, called it audacious, impertinent even — a professional swordsman flicking his opponent across the face before the bout has formally begun.

Here is where the story gets more interesting than the legend, because the legend says that night was a pitched battle and the evidence says something else.

Adèle Hugo, the playwright's wife, wrote of colossal applause. The first night went Hugo's way. The young men with the red tickets outshouted whatever resistance there was, and the play reached its end. It was over the following weeks that things turned ugly. The actor Joanny, who was in the company, kept a diary through the run, and his entries describe the escalation — by early March, vigorous attack and defence from the house; by the middle of the month, a fierce cabal; the hissers booking seats specifically to hiss, the defenders booking seats specifically to drown them out. Lines were laughed at on purpose. Whole speeches were lost under noise. The disturbance did not really settle until June, and by then Hernani had played something like thirty-nine performances to houses that came, in large part, to fight.

So the battle of Hernani was not a night. It was a season.

And it was a season with a very particular ending. In the last week of July 1830, a few weeks after the play's disturbances finally died down, Paris rose in three days of street fighting and Charles X — the king whose censors had banned Marion de Lorme — lost his throne. The next year Marion de Lorme was staged at the Porte Saint-Martin, with nobody left to forbid it. It is too neat to say that the fight over an enjambment rehearsed the fight over a monarchy. But the young men with red tickets and the young men on the barricades that summer wanted, in the end, the same thing: the right of a new generation to stop asking permission.

Fourteen years later Giuseppe Verdi turned the play into Ernani, and it is as an Italian opera, in Italian verse that runs over its lines as freely as it likes, that most of the world has heard it since. The house that hissed dérobé would have had a great deal to say about that.

Why, then, do we remember it as a night?

Because of Gautier. And because of a waistcoat.

Gautier became one of the great men of French letters — the poet of Émaux et Camées, the critic who made l'art pour l'art a creed, the novelist of Mademoiselle de Maupin. And near the end of his life he wrote the Histoire du Romantisme, and in it he wrote Hernani's first night the way a veteran writes his first campaign: the waiting, the chocolate, the enemy in their boxes, the glorious charge. It was published after his death in 1872. By then the Romantics had won so completely that nobody was in a position to contradict him.

Gautier went to that first night in a conspicuous waistcoat, and that waistcoat became the most famous garment in French literary history. It is always remembered as red — le gilet rouge, the scarlet flag of the revolution in verse. The Victor Hugo museum's own researchers point out, a little wearily, that at least one account has it as pink satin. Not a battle flag. A dandy's doublet, chosen to annoy the bourgeoisie, the colour of something you might find on a sweet tin.

Nobody wants the pink waistcoat. It does not fit the story.

I find this oddly moving rather than disillusioning. A young man dresses up to annoy his elders, sits in a theatre for most of a day eating bread rolls, cheers himself hoarse for a friend's play, and then spends the next forty years quietly upgrading the memory until the doublet is a flag and the evening is a war. That is not lying. That is what we all do with the nights that made us. The difference is that Gautier happened to become the person whose memory got printed.

It also tells you something about what the classicists were actually defending, and it was not really the alexandrine. Nobody hisses a line break for three months because of prosody. They hissed because the young men with red tickets were very obviously coming for the theatre — for the seats, the repertoire, the house style, the right to decide what tragedy sounded like. The enjambment was simply the first visible place where the new people had put their hands on the old furniture.

That pattern is going to recur in every piece in this Feature. The fight is always about something small and specific — a line, a word, a dance step, a portrayal. And it is never really about the small, specific thing.

Sixty-six years later, across the river and a few streets north, a twenty-three-year-old would provoke something very like the Hernani row with a single word instead of a line break.

He did not need red tickets. He needed one extra letter.

Hierro. Iron.

It is the French word for shit with an extra r in it. The r is the joke. It is a schoolboy's way of saying the forbidden word while technically not saying it — the same logic by which an Indian teenager writes a swear word with an asterisk in the middle and considers the matter legally settled. Firmin Gémier, playing Père Ubu, a grotesque, greedy, cowardly usurper of the Polish throne, walked to the front of the stage and said it to a full Parisian house.

The house did not let him say much else for a while.

Accounts vary on how long the uproar lasted — a quarter of an hour is the figure that gets repeated, and like most figures attached to famous nights, it should be held loosely. What is not in dispute is that the theatre split almost at once into those who were outraged and those who were delighted to be outraged at, and that the two halves spent the rest of the evening shouting at each other over the heads of the actors. Ubu Roi had been staged by Aurélien Lugné-Poe's Théâtre de l'Œuvre, the most adventurous company in the city, at 15 rue Blanche, in the ninth arrondissement. It was given as an invited dress rehearsal and a single public performance.

Two performances. That is all Ubu Roi got.

The choice of theatre matters. Lugné-Poe's company was the home of the Symbolists — the place where Paris went to see Ibsen and Maeterlinck, plays performed in a hush, in half-light, by actors who barely moved, for an audience that prided itself on its stillness. It was the most refined room in the city. Jarry walked into it and threw a chamber pot.

The plot, such as it is, is Macbeth rewritten by a fourteen-year-old with a grudge. Mère Ubu goads her husband into murdering good King Venceslas of Poland. Ubu takes the throne, and then, with a kind of bureaucratic relish, disposes of everyone who might cost him money — the nobles, the magistrates, the financiers, all fed into a machine in turn — and taxes the peasants personally, going door to door. He goes to war with Russia, runs away, and finally escapes by ship, sailing off towards France with his wife, entirely unpunished. Nobody learns anything. That was rather the point.

Alfred Jarry was twenty-three. He had begun Ubu years earlier, as a schoolboy at the lycée in Rennes, where the boys had invented a monstrous comic figure out of a physics master they despised — a fat, earnest, hopelessly mocked man named Hébert, whom generations of pupils had turned into a legend called Père Heb — and had played him out with friends in a home-made puppet theatre. The real Hébert, by most accounts, was guilty of nothing worse than being boring and unable to keep order. Every school has one. Most of them do not end up as the most famous tyrant in modern French drama. Jarry carried the character to Paris, fattened it, and wrote it up as a full play. Before the curtain on that first night he came out himself — small, pale, oddly formal — and gave the audience a short speech of the kind that has kept scholars busy ever since. They were free, he told them, to see in M. Ubu however many allusions they cared to, or else a simple puppet — a schoolboy's caricature of one of his teachers.

Think about what that does. It is the first opening-night disclaimer in this Feature, and it will not be the last. Jarry offers the house two readings: the play is about everything, or the play is about nothing. Choose. And whichever one you choose, you are the one who chose it.

The staging was designed to make sure nobody could settle comfortably on either. Jarry did not want historical costume or realist scenery. He wanted the actors to move like puppets, wanted a sign carried on to tell the audience where each scene was set, wanted King Ubu at one point to wear a cardboard horse's head round his neck, as in the old English theatre. Claude Terrasse wrote the music and played it himself. The whole thing was conceived as a sort of brilliant, filthy toy.

In the house that night was a thirty-one-year-old Irish poet who did not have enough French to follow it.

William Butler Yeats had come with a friend who explained it to him as it went along. Whatever else he missed, he did not miss the first word. Years later he wrote it down, in a memoir called The Trembling of the Veil. The players, he said, are supposed to be dolls, toys, marionettes, and now they are all hopping like wooden frogs, and I can see for myself that the chief personage, who is some kind of king, carries for sceptre a brush of the kind that we use to clean a closet.

A lavatory brush. For a sceptre.

He and his friend, feeling bound to support the most spirited party, shouted for the play. And then Yeats went back to his room at the Hôtel Corneille and found that he was very sad. He had spent his life on the subtle art of the 1890s, and here was a play that answered all of it with a toilet brush. The sentence he wrote about it is a list, and it is worth having whole:

After Stéphane Mallarmé, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after all our subtle colour and nervous rhythm, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible? After us the Savage God.

Six names, a generation's whole refined achievement, laid out like a row of candles. And then the brush.

It is one of the most quoted sentences in the history of modern drama, and it is worth noticing what it is: a man who could not understand the language, recalling a performance a quarter of a century later, in a book written to make sense of his own life. It is a prophecy recorded long after the prophesied thing had happened. By the time Yeats wrote it down, the Savage God had arrived — Dada, the Surrealists, a world war — and the sentence reads as foresight because he knew how the story ended.

That does not make it untrue. It makes it Yeats's. The Ubu Roi that history keeps is substantially the one an Irishman with poor French brought home.

And Jarry? He never had another success remotely like it. He drank himself steadily towards an early death, carried a revolver around Paris, took to speaking of himself in the royal plural in the manner of Ubu, and died in 1907 at thirty-four, reportedly asking for a toothpick. The character ate the man. There is a version of this piece that would be a tragedy about that.

The play, meanwhile, had the last laugh, as Ubu always does. The Dadaists claimed Jarry, and the Surrealists after them; the Theatre of the Absurd treated him as a grandfather. The science he invented as a joke, 'pataphysics — the science of imaginary solutions — acquired a college of its own in Paris, half serious and half not. And Ubu Roi, the play that got two performances and a riot, is now done in French schools. The word that stopped a Parisian theatre in 1896 is recited by teenagers who think it is hilarious, which is precisely what the teenager who wrote it thought too.

But there is a better thread to pull, and it runs straight out of the rue Blanche and across the Irish Sea.

Because eleven years after he sat in that Paris audience shouting for a play he could not understand, Yeats would be the one running the theatre. He would be the one watching an audience stop a play in its tracks. And the word that stopped it would be, if anything, even smaller than Merdre.

He did not shout for the play that time.

Audience broke up in disorder at the word shift.

A shift is a woman's undergarment — a plain linen slip worn under everything else. It was a perfectly ordinary word in rural Ireland in 1907. It was also, as the Abbey Theatre discovered that night, a word that could not be said on a Dublin stage without bringing the house down around it.

The play was John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, and for two acts it had gone quietly. A young man named Christy Mahon stumbles into a pub on the Mayo coast and announces that he has killed his father with a spade. Instead of handing him over, the villagers are thrilled. He becomes a celebrity overnight. The girls bring him eggs and butter and a pullet. Pegeen Mike, the publican's daughter, falls for him. Everyone, in short, loves a murderer — until the father turns up, alive, with a bandaged head.

The Abbey itself was barely three years old. Yeats and Lady Gregory had opened it in Abbey Street at the end of 1904 as a national theatre — the Irish stage that the Irish independence movement was supposed to want, a place where the country would see itself in its own words. Synge was its great discovery and its great problem. His In the Shadow of the Glen, in 1903, had already been attacked by nationalists because in it a wife walks out on her husband; Irish wives, it was said, did no such thing. Riders to the Sea, his one-act tragedy of an island mother losing her sons to the water, had been forgiven because nobody in it did anything worse than drown. The Playboy was the first full-length test of how much Ireland the national theatre's audience was prepared to look at.

It is a comedy, a savage one, and the Abbey audience had been absorbing the savagery without complaint. Then, in the third act, Christy declares that he wants only Pegeen — that he would not care if he were offered a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself, maybe, from this place to the Eastern World.

Disorder.

What followed was a full week, and it is the best-documented riot in this Feature, which is worth saying because the next piece concerns one that may not have happened at all.

On the Monday the police were at the door. The audience jeered from start to finish, and the actors, unable to make themselves heard, played much of the evening in dumb show — mouthing their lines to a house that was drowning them out. The curtain came down before the end.

Picture that Monday for a moment, because it is the strangest image in this whole Feature. A company of actors on the stage of their own national theatre, in full costume, playing a comedy built entirely on the music of Irish speech — the rhythms Synge had spent years collecting on the Aran Islands, the itself and the maybe and the long, looping sentences — and doing it in silence, mouthing every line to a house that had decided it would not hear one. A play about language, performed without any. It is the Hernani season compressed into a single evening and turned inside out: in Paris the defenders shouted down the hissers; in Dublin the protesters simply drowned out the play.

On the Tuesday Yeats was back in Dublin, and he did what Hugo had done in 1830: he packed the house with his own side. He handed out free tickets to students from Trinity College, which in the Dublin of 1907 was a provocation in itself — Trinity was Protestant, unionist, and English in its loyalties, and the young men he invited turned up drunk and sang God Save the King at the nationalists, who sang back. Arrests followed. By the Wednesday there were something like seventy police round the theatre. For the rest of the week Yeats spent his days in the police court giving evidence against the men who had disrupted his play, and his nights watching it go on under the heaviest guard a Dublin theatre had seen.

So: an organised claque, a counter-claque bussed in by the management, police in the aisles, a playwright's ally in the witness box. It is Hernani again, seventy-seven years on and a sea away, with the roles exactly rearranged. In Paris the young had stormed the theatre of the old. In Dublin the old — or at least the pious — stormed the theatre of the young, and the young had to send for the constables.

What were they defending?

Not, really, a word. A woman.

The nationalist press was very clear about it. The Freeman's Journal called the play an unmitigated, protracted libel upon Irish peasant men and, worse still, upon Irish peasant girlhood. Arthur Griffith, who had founded Sinn Féin two years earlier and would later sign the Treaty, called it a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language. Their Ireland, the Ireland worth winning independence for, was a country of chaste women and decent men, and here was a Protestant playwright putting murderers on a pedestal and Irish girls in their underwear in front of the whole of Dublin.

The woman they were defending did not exist. She was a figure in a political argument, assembled out of sermons and ballads and a great deal of wishful thinking. But that is precisely why she was so fiercely defended. A real woman can look after herself. An idea of one needs an army.

Anyone who has followed Indian arguments about films, books or advertisements over the last thirty years will recognise the outline instantly. The protesting crowd is not defending any actual person. It is defending a portrait of a community that the community would like to be true, and the artwork's crime is to have shown something else. The language of 1907 Dublin — libel, insult, an outrage on our women — would not need much translating to work in a press release in Bombay.

And here is the odd part. The audience that rose at the word shift had sat through the thing actually worth being shocked by, and would go on to miss the rest of it. Because the third act of the Playboy does not stop at an undergarment. The father walks in, alive. The village that adored Christy for a murder he had not committed turns on him in an instant for being a fraud. Christy, desperate to be loved again, goes out and strikes the old man down a second time, in front of them — and this time, with the deed done under their own eyes, they tie him up to be hanged, and Pegeen, the girl who loved him, holds a lighted sod of turf to his leg. A murder told as a story is glamorous. A murder done in your own yard is a crime. That is the play's whole, appalling, very funny argument about how people consume violence. The father turns out, ridiculously, to be alive again, and father and son walk off together, and Pegeen is left with the last line of the play: she has lost him surely, she says — the only Playboy of the Western World.

Dublin rioted over the shift. The lynching went by without comment.

Synge said very little in public. He was a reticent, shy, rather sickly man of thirty-five, who had spent years on the Aran Islands listening to the way people actually talked and had tried, in his plays, to put that speech on stage without improving it. The shift was in the play because it was in the language. That was, for him, the whole point.

He had two years left to live. He died in March 1909, at thirty-seven, of Hodgkin's disease, having been for most of his short career the most hated writer in Ireland. The play outlived its riots by a considerable margin; it became the Abbey's signature work, and the play every Irish theatre student is eventually made to read. When the company took it to America in 1911–12, the trouble followed them — in Philadelphia, in January 1912, a local saloon-keeper named Joseph McGarrity interrupted a performance and then had the players prosecuted for staging an immoral production.

And Yeats himself would have to do it all again.

In February 1926 the Abbey staged Seán O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars, and another nationalist audience rose against it, this time for bringing the tricolour into a pub and a prostitute onto the stage of the Easter Rising. Yeats walked out in front of the crowd and told them they had disgraced themselves again — that this was getting to be a recurring celebration of the arrival of Irish genius.

He had sat on the other side of that noise once, in Paris, shouting for a play he could not understand.

Hold on to that image, because it is the most solid fact in this piece. Pierre Monteux, conducting, wedged in among a vastly enlarged orchestra, most of it borrowed from the Concerts Colonne. Above him on stage, the dancers of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Nicholas Roerich's heavy peasant costumes, about to perform Vaslav Nijinsky's choreography for a pagan Russian rite in which a young girl dances herself to death. And in the wings, if you believe the composer, Nijinsky standing on a chair, shouting the counts at the dancers, because the music was too loud and too strange and the house too noisy for them to hear it.

Igor Stravinsky was thirty. He said he stood behind Nijinsky holding on to the tails of his coat so that the choreographer would not leap on stage and make things worse.

Everything else about that night is an argument.

The setup, at least, is clear. Diaghilev's company was the most fashionable thing in Paris. Stravinsky had already given it two triumphs, The Firebird in 1910 and Petrushka in 1911, and the city was expecting a third. The Rite had been brewing since Stravinsky had a vision — his word — of a solemn pagan ritual in which elders watch a young girl dance herself to death to make the spring come. He worked out the scenario with Nicholas Roerich, painter and archaeologist of ancient Russia, who designed the sets and costumes. Nijinsky, in his mid-twenties, the greatest dancer of his age and almost entirely untested as a choreographer, was given the dance. Diaghilev knew exactly what he had commissioned. Several accounts have him delighted by the noise afterwards; it was, as far as he was concerned, publicity.

Here is the version you know. The bassoon opens high, alone, in a register nobody had heard a bassoon play in. Laughter breaks out almost at once. By the time the curtain rises the house is in uproar. Fights break out between the fashionable boxes and the bohemian gallery. Vegetables are thrown. Forty people are ejected. Camille Saint-Saëns, the grand old man of French music, storms out in disgust. Diaghilev flashes the house lights to calm things down. The police are called. The music cannot be heard over the screaming. And the American critic Carl Van Vechten, sitting in the stalls, finds that the young man behind him has become so excited that he is beating time with his fists on the top of Van Vechten's head.

It is a magnificent story. A good deal of it is not true.

Start with Saint-Saëns. Stravinsky himself, years later, said flatly that it was impossible — Saint-Saëns was not there. The old man did walk out of a performance of the Rite, it seems, but that was the concert version, without dancers, in April 1914, nearly a year later, when he is supposed to have declared that Stravinsky was mad. The story moved itself back eleven months to the night where it belonged.

Then the head-beating. It is the most vivid detail in the whole legend, the one every programme note reaches for, and it comes from Van Vechten — who wrote it down in 1915, two years on, and who later conceded that he had not been at the premiere at all. He had been at the second performance. The fists were real, perhaps. The night was not.

Then the word itself. The French critics who reviewed the first night described something rowdy and divided — a house that hissed and cheered and argued, one camp loudly against, one loudly for. Several of them reached for the same comparison: a stormy session of parliament, a court case, a fierce public quarrel. Not a battle. Nobody in 1913 called it a riot. That word does not attach itself to the evening in print, as far as anyone has been able to trace, until 1924 — when an American critic used it in a review of a later performance, looking back across eleven years and a world war to a night he did not describe having seen.

So the riot arrived late. Like Gautier's waistcoat changing colour, it was added after the fact by people who already knew the music had won.

None of this means the night was quiet. It plainly was not. Something extraordinary happened in that theatre, and the people who were there knew it. But it is worth asking what, exactly, they were shouting about, because the received answer — that Paris was scandalised by Stravinsky's music — is almost certainly wrong.

The great Stravinsky scholar Richard Taruskin put it bluntly: it was not the music that did the shocking. It was the dancing. It was the ugly, earthbound lurching and stomping that Nijinsky had devised — dancers with their toes turned in, their knees bent, their heads lolling, jumping flat-footed and landing heavily, as far from the floating line of classical ballet as a body could be pushed. The music, in that house, on that night, was barely audible over the noise. What the audience could see perfectly clearly was a troupe of the best-trained dancers in Europe being made to move like something dug out of the ground.

This is the Hernani line break all over again, and the Playboy shift. A Parisian ballet audience in 1913 carried the vocabulary of classical dance in its body the way a Comédie-Française audience carried the alexandrine. Nijinsky did not merely use a new vocabulary; he deliberately broke the old one, turned it inside out, made the turnout turn in. It was an enjambment of the whole body.

And then it vanished.

Nijinsky's choreography was danced eight times — the Paris run and a handful of performances in London — and never again in his lifetime. He fell out with Diaghilev months later, married, was dismissed from the company, and within a few years had begun the slide into the mental illness that would take up the rest of his life. Nobody filmed the Rite. Nobody wrote it down properly. What survives are Valentine Gross's sketches made in the theatre, some photographs, Roerich's costume designs, the memories of a few dancers, and a reconstruction, painstakingly assembled from those fragments, that is as close as anyone now alive will get. The dance historian Millicent Hodson spent years on it with the designer Kenneth Archer, piecing the steps together from sketches, scores annotated in rehearsal, reviews and the recollections of the last surviving dancers, and the Joffrey Ballet finally danced it in 1987. It is a magnificent piece of detective work. It is also, inevitably, a guess — a dance put back together by people who never saw it, which is to say, the same position as nearly everyone who has ever written about that night.

The music, meanwhile, did not need the dancing at all. In April 1914, less than a year after the premiere, the Rite was played in Paris as a concert piece, without a single dancer, and Stravinsky was carried out of the hall on the shoulders of admirers. Same city. Same score, more or less. The difference was that there was nothing left on stage to object to.

From there it became the most influential score of the century. It went into concert halls, into conservatories, eventually into Fantasia. And as Stravinsky's reputation rose, the night of its premiere rose with it, until the noise of 29 May 1913 became the founding myth of modernism itself: the moment the twentieth century walked into a theatre and the nineteenth century screamed.

We covered a version of this problem in these pages in August, writing about Indian radio drama — about the plays that went out over the air and were never kept, and how a medium can be enormously popular and still leave almost nothing behind. Dance is the art form with the worst memory of all. A score survives on paper. A play survives in its text. A dance survives in bodies, and bodies leave.

Which means the Rite we have is, in a real sense, Stravinsky's alone — and the riot that made it famous is a story told about Nijinsky's dancing by people who mostly could not see it, could not remember it, or were not there.

Ninety-nine musicians. Eight performances. One word, eleven years late.

He told the story in January 2023, at a Marathi literary gathering in Pimpri-Chinchwad, an old man remembering a young man's scrape. The troupe performing Vijay Tendulkar's Ghashiram Kotwal had been invited to Germany. The Shiv Sena had decided it would not go. Pawar, then a rising figure in the state government, had gone with the director Jabbar Patel to meet the man behind the opposition, a man who was also his friend, and had failed to talk him round. That man, Pawar said, was Balasaheb Thackeray.

So Pawar borrowed an industrialist's aircraft. The cast and crew were flown from Pune to Bombay over the heads of the people waiting for them on the road. By the time the five-hundred-strong mob had assembled, he said, they were already at Bombay airport. They flew to Germany. The show went on.

It is the best opening of any story in this Feature, and it is the only one in which nothing happened inside a theatre at all.

Ghashiram Kotwal first opened on 16 December 1972, at the Bharat Natya Mandir in Pune, directed by Jabbar Patel, with Mohan Agashe as Nana Phadnavis. It is set in Peshwa-era Pune at the end of the eighteenth century. Ghashiram is an outsider, a Brahmin from the north, humiliated by the city's elite, who offers his own young daughter to Nana Phadnavis — the Peshwa's chief minister and the real power in Pune — in exchange for being made kotwal, the city's chief of police. Nana agrees. Ghashiram is given the city, and runs it with a sadism the city has fully earned. And when Ghashiram has served his purpose, Nana throws him to the mob.

Tendulkar built it out of Marathi folk forms — the songs and dances of tamasha, the devotional structure of kirtan — and Patel staged it around a chorus of Brahmins who formed a living, swaying wall across the stage, a human curtain that hid and revealed the action and sang the city's piety while the city's rot went on behind it. It is one of the great productions in the history of Indian theatre, and it is still, more than half a century on, the image most people carry of modern Marathi drama.

Tendulkar was forty-four and had been fought over before. Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe, in 1967, had put a mock trial of a woman on stage and let it curdle into a real one, and audiences had squirmed in exactly the way he intended. But Shantata! was about the cruelty of ordinary people. Ghashiram was about the cruelty of the state, and it chose as its villain a man with descendants, admirers, and a statue's worth of reputation.

It was also, from the beginning, a play about power that a great many powerful people took personally.

The objection was to Nana Phadnavis. He was not a fictional character. He was a real minister of the Peshwa, dead since 1800, and for a section of Pune's Chitpavan Brahmin community he was a figure of particular pride — the shrewd statesman who held the Maratha state together against the British. He had come of age in the wreckage of Panipat, survived the court intrigues that followed, and spent the last quarter of the eighteenth century running Pune as a kind of chief executive with a ledger in one hand and a network of spies in the other. The British, who found him very hard to outmanoeuvre, are said to have called him the Maratha Machiavelli. It was meant as a compliment. In Pune, two centuries on, the grandeur was the point; the spies and the ledgers were the price of greatness. Tendulkar's Nana was a lecher who traded in a child. There is, scholars are fairly clear, no historical evidence to support that portrayal; Tendulkar was never pretending otherwise. He said the play was not about history. It was about a pattern — about the way power uses men like Ghashiram and then disposes of them.

None of that helped. Accused of hurting the sentiments of Pune's Brahmins, the play was withdrawn by its own producers, the Progressive Dramatic Association. The cast refused to let it die. They broke away, formed a new company called the Theatre Academy, rehearsed it again, and put it back on.

Then came the Shiv Sena. Manohar Joshi — later chief minister of the state — led protests in Bombay. Performances were stopped. The play was, for a time, banned. And eventually a compromise was reached that would have made Alfred Jarry smile: before each show, an announcement was made to the audience that no malice was intended.

There it is again. Jarry, in 1896, telling the house it was free to see in his king however many allusions it cared to, or only a puppet. Pune, in the 1970s, telling the house there was no malice in it at all. The disclaimer is the oldest piece of stage furniture in the world.

What makes Ghashiram different from every other night in this Feature is where the fight took place.

In Paris in 1830 the battle was in the stalls. In Paris in 1896 the noise was in the house. In Dublin the police stood in the aisles while the actors mimed. Even the Rite, whatever it really was, was an argument between people who had paid for their seats. All of those were audiences, fighting over something they had seen.

Ghashiram was fought by people who had no intention of seeing it, to stop anyone else from seeing it either. The withdrawal, the ban, the protests outside, the blockade on the road at Khopoli — none of it happened inside a theatre. The opposition did not want to win the argument in the house. It wanted to make sure there was no house.

That is a different thing, and Tendulkar knew it better than anyone. In the same year Ghashiram opened, his Sakharam Binder — a play about a bookbinder who takes in abandoned women — was being fought over not in the stalls but in the files. The state's Stage Performances Scrutiny Board granted it a certificate on 4 March 1972, cancelled it on 6 April, was stopped by the High Court the next day, and in May imposed thirty-two conditions on the play, many of them decided by board members who had not actually seen it. The Bombay High Court eventually struck the rules down as unconstitutional. It was a victory. It was also a long way from a red ticket and a bread roll in the Comédie-Française.

The play did not merely survive. Theatre Academy took Ghashiram Kotwal to Western Europe in 1980, to the United States and Canada in 1986, and to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in 1989, and it played, by then, to audiences who had never heard of Nana Phadnavis and found the play perfectly clear without him. A pattern, as Tendulkar had said. Not history.

It had also, by then, escaped the stage altogether. In 1976 a cooperative of sixteen young graduates of the Film and Television Institute in Pune, calling themselves YUKT, made Ghashiram Kotwal into a film — directed jointly by four of them, K. Hariharan, Mani Kaul, Kamal Swaroop and Saeed Akhtar Mirza, with a young actor named Om Puri in his first screen role as Ghashiram. Tendulkar adapted his own play, which by then had passed eighty performances across Maharashtra. The film vanished after a short run in Pune and turned up, two years later, at the Berlin Film Festival. The Arsenal institute in Berlin has since restored it.

Berlin again. It is a city that keeps turning up in this story.

And here is the last turn, the one this whole Feature has been building to.

The reports of Pawar's 2023 speech date the airlift to 1972, the year the play opened. But the first foreign tour anyone records is the European one of 1980, eight years later. Somewhere in half a century of retelling, the night has quietly moved — the way Gautier changed the colour of his waistcoat and the Rite's riot drifted eleven years after the event.

Nobody is lying. A story is simply being kept by the person it made.