Encouraged by the successful inaugural edition of The Hindu MetroPlus Theatre Fest last year, we are happy to be back in Coimbatore with the second edition.
This August, the Fest – which was launched in Chennai in 2005 and held annually ever since – will run in five cities. Over the month, it will feature 20 performances in five cities – Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Coimbatore and, for the very first time, Kochi.
The Coimbatore edition features four fine plays. We begin with Akvarious Productions’ award-winning ‘The Interview’, an intriguing exploration of how the everyday can lead to the unexpected. This is followed by The Madras Players (in association with The Boardwalkers), which performs the Pulitzer Prize-winning play
‘Doubt’, a play that tackles the issue of guilt and paranoia in a Catholic institution. Next up is The Company Theatre with ‘The Blue Mug’, a free-flowing narrative of personal memories that is performed by a star-studded cast and comes to Kochi after hugely successful tours in the U.S., Europe and Singapore. The curtains come down with Girish Karnad’s ‘Wedding Album’ by Primetime Theatre Co., a sharp dissection of the traditional Indian wedding in the age of globalisation.
Over the years, our engagement with theatre has grown considerably. This is reflected in the Fest travelling to more and more cities. In 2008, we instituted the annual The Hindu MetroPlus Playwright Award, which carries a prize of Rs. 1 lakh for the best play script in English. Last year, the scripts that won the first three awards were spun out into a book published by Penguin. We hope you enjoy what we have in store this year. And we hope you continue supporting the Fest as you have done since its inception.
N. Ram
Editor-in-Chief
The Hindu
