MetroPlus brings national and local theatre groups together for a unique festival, says SHONALI MUTHALALY

TIME FOR THEATRE The itinerary for the festival"

We don't know whether all the world's a stage, as the Bard famously said, but Chennai is going to be in the spotlight this August. Between August 5 and 15, MetroPlus brings together some of the city's and country's most popular theatre groups for a carnival on stage.

The MetroPlus Theatre Festival provides an opportunity to showcase talent from home and elsewhere. At the same time, it offers Chennai's theatre-loving public — a steadily growing body — a chance to witness a variety of plays over a stretch of 11 days.

On show are 9 theatre groups: Ranga Shankara (Bangalore), The Company Theatre and The Primetime Theatre Company (Mumbai) and Yatrik (New Delhi) and five Chennai groups, The Madras Players, Evam, Boardwalkers, Stage Fright and Magic Lantern.

Opening night

Ranga Shankara, which opens the festival, is actually a Bangalore-based theatre space, created to take theatre from Karnataka and all over India, to Bangalore. At the MetroPlus festival, it will stage Girish Karnad "A Heap of Broken Images". The play, written and directed by the famous playwright and actor, is described as `a one-woman act.' It's about a woman who suddenly becomes rich and internationally famous by writing a bestseller in English. However, she is haunted by the thought that she's betrayed her own language by opting for a global audience.

Yatrik will be bringing their longest running and most popular play "9 Jakhoo Hill", written by Gurcharan Das and directed by Sunit Tandon. Described as a "powerful new Indian play in English," it is set in Shimla in 1962, when India is at war with China. The play deals with the interpersonal relationships of an upper middle class family and their friends, touching upon issues of class and power as an old world gives way to new economic and social forces. Described as "intimate and warm, touching and amusing," the play has been performed in New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Shimla, Dubai and South Africa. Says Sabina Jaitly, Director of Yatrik, one of Delhi's best-known theatre groups: "9 Jakhoo Hill is a simple play but the reaction has been wonderful wherever we have staged it. We won the Critic's Choice award at an international arts festival in South Africa."

The 12-year-old Company Theatre, which promotes theatre in various ways — by organising international conferences on theatre spaces, international theatre festivals and performances in alternative spaces across India, will be staging "Creeps" by Lutz Hubner. The play, directed by Atul Kumar, is a youth drama written for the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. The group describes it as "a powerful shocker about the demagogical fictional reality of television that affects inner life, and about the misuse of the pictures and identities of real people."

Longest running play

Mahesh Dattani's "Dance Like A Man," directed by Lillete Dubey, will be presented by The Primetime Theatre Company. Starring Suchitra Pillai and Lillete Dubey, the play about a family of Bharatanatyam dancers, which opened in July 1995, has travelled the globe, been made into a movie and completed 200 shows, making it the longest running original Indian English play in the country today. The Primetime Theatre Company, set up in 1991, works on promoting original Indian writing in English for the stage.

A scene from Girish Karnad's "A Heap of Broken Images

Chennai-based Magic Lantern will be performing fragments from Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" and Edward Albee's "The Zoo Story". Formed in 1992, the group focusses on reviving theatre as a popular voice of the people. The presentations, the first created by the actors and the second by Magic Lantern's creative head, Pravin, will begin with an abbreviated and Indianised "The Bell Jar," a haunting story of a brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful woman, who is slowly falling apart. "The Zoo Story", which combines both realism and elements of the absurd, deals with issues of human isolation and loneliness.

Stagefright Productions, run by Freddy Koikaran and Roshni Menon, is a relatively young theatre group, which made its debut in 2000 and works on promoting local talent. Their performance comprises four short plays by different playwrights, irreverently clubbed together under the title "Fourplay". The central theme of love runs through each story, although each play focusses on a different aspect of love.

Evam Entertainment, the logistics partner for the MetroPlus Theatre Festival, will wind up the festival with "Biloxi Blues", part two of Neil Simon's semi-autobiographical theatre trilogy. The play, directed by Michael Muthu, is set in a boot camp at the end of World War II, and is a comedy tempered with the sombre realities of war.

Muthu also directs "The Fallen", an original rock opera written by him, which will be making its debut under the Boardwalkers banner. The Boardwalkers, a 17-year-old entertainment company, is involved with concerts, film production and event management, besides theatre. "The Fallen" stars David Pascal as God.

The Madras Players, which needs no introduction, will present "The Final Twist", a play first produced for BBC Radio in March, 1996. The play, directed by N.S. Yamuna, is about an aging demigod of stage and screen, with multiple marriages behind him who engages a writer to create a script for a play — the perfect murder of his wife. By the way, the 50-year-old group, which has the distinction of having presented the maximum number of `first stagings in English' of the works of Indian playwrights such as Girish Karnad, Vijay Tendulkar and Mahesh Dattani, celebrates its Golden Jubilee this year.

The MetroPlus Theatre Festival is presented by Bru Malabar, the event's main sponsor. The associate sponsors are Bose, Ayush and Prince Jewellery. The Park Hotel is the Hospitality Sponsor.