Society complains about dearth of original content. Theatre groups burn the midnight oil to look for good scripts. Suddenly, they realise there is a Shakespeare in every Chennaiite, and decide to bring him/her out. Hence, the Great Indian Blogologues happens, and how!
An (almost) rainy Sunday evening is best spent sipping a hot cuppa by the window. But what is better than compulsively looking for an elusive downpour is to spend it watching blog posts come alive, and rather funnily at that.
“We wanted to get new audience to theatre and realised there is a good bunch of bloggers in the city. There is actually a lot of original content online, and no one's ever looked at it as a possible script. What Stray Factory has done is chain some posts together in three parts, to make three short plays. It took us about five months, but we're finally here,” says Mathivanan Rajendran, one of the directors.
Three plays were performed in all — ‘Judy finds The One', ‘Vigilante vs. Vigilante' and ‘Confessions of a Scattered Mind', staying very close to the original script by Judy Balan, Giri Vijayakumar, Charan, S. Pradeep Kumar, Teenu Terrance, Anuraag Seshadri, Athisha, Vinay Menon and Zaid Mohammed. While the transitions between the various blog posts were good bar some technical difficulties (they used two TVs to act as thought bubbles and two-way phone conversations), the plays saw the bloggers guffawing at their own posts.
“Indiblogger tied up with Stray Factory for this production. We sent out a newsletter to all our members and received 1,012 entries in a week and shortlisted a few. We are always on the look out to bringing bloggers to light, and this is another medium to do so. This was also a brilliant concept, and we'll continue to tie up with them for the other chapters too,” Renie Ravin of Indiblogger explains.
All the plays have a line of humour running through them, with one part enacted completely in Tamil. Another parodies politics and even caricatures politicians who overuse Twitter. Though the concept wasn't incredibly clear and left you lost in parts, the script was funny enough to let it pass. There is also a full-fledged musical about a traffic jam in the third play!
“We realised that there is great opportunity to experiment with original content. With existing scripts, you can't do much. But here, it's much more local and we talk about the city and Besant Nagar. There is more proximity with the audience. And, we keep improvising, so much that two days before the performance, we realised we had to stop if we wanted to finalise the script at all,” Mathivanan laughs.
Judy Balan, three of whose posts were selected for the play, says: “I've been blogging for a year and mostly write humour. Blogologues was an interesting concept and the only one that didn't require you to write again from scratch. They wanted any entry that you thought was your best.”
As for the acting and script, the audience's rollicking laughter was the verdict. The Great Indian Blogologues kicked off in Chennai, and another performance is slated for November 13. They will also be visiting other cities every quarter.
For details, call 97909-11711.
