An idea that sparked over a cup of coffee in 2005 is now one of largest privately organised theatre events in the country (attracting over 10,000 footfalls last year). Over the years, The Hindu Theatre Fest has showcased award-winning plays from around the country and the world, and 2016 marked a push in diversity with the showcasing of three Tamil plays. “A mix is what we aim to strive for with the curation — between the more popular and the more challenging plays. A kind of diversity that provides something for every theatregoer,” shares Mukund Padmanabhan, Editor, The Hindu . At the 13th edition of the fest this August (with satellites in Bengaluru and Hyderabad), expect six productions that range from the comic and the contemporary to drama. While comedy — increasingly the audience favourite — gets its due with plays like Khwaab-sa and the more thought-provoking Loretta, there are also thrillers (Barff), dramas (12 Angry Jurors) and more. “Every festival has its own character. Ours has succeeded in bringing kinds of theatre to places where they may not have come, if it weren’t for the fest,” says Padmanabhan. Here’s a look at what you can expect in just over a month:
12 Angry Jurors
The fact that the jury system is no longer practised in India didn’t trouble Nadir Khan, when he decided to direct 12 Angry Jurors for Rage Productions last year. “The themes it deals with — like blind justice and prejudice — are current to our context now. So as the story unfolds, I think it is an easy point to forget,” says Khan. The play — an almost true rendition of the 1954 teleplay by American writer Reginald Rose — revolves around 12 people who must decide if a slum boy accused of murdering his father is guilty or not.
It is not a social message that attracted Khan to it, but its human stories. “It’s a huge thing for ordinary people to be put into a room to decide whether a man (in this context, a boy) is to live or die. So it was more about the dynamics of the individuals and if they can put aside their agendas and make the right choice,” he says.
Predominantly in English (with a few lines in Hindi), the play’s setting was a challenge. “It’s a static room, so we’ve augmented what is happening on stage with video, which will hopefully be a contributor to the action rather than a distraction,” he says. Another challenge: having 12 people on stage all the time. “As a theatregoer, I am drawn to watching people who aren’t actively involved in the scene at that point, to see what their reactions are. So the challenge was finding a way to concentrate my attention on all 12.” The cast — which has most of Khan’s first choices for characters — includes Rajit Kapur, Prerna Chawla, Suresh Venkataraman (débuting) and Deven Khote (co-founder of UTV), who was brought out of retirement.
August 11, at Sir Mutha Venkatasubba Rao Hall.
Khwaab-sa
Atul Kumar is frank: if he could go back 20 years, he’d turn his back on theatre and choose to be a contemporary dancer. “I am excited by movement and being able to communicate through just bodies and space,” says the actor-director, who, after 25 years on stage, finally got to experiment with it last year, in his play, Khwaab-sa . But the idea for the adaptation of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream , it seems, had taken seed much earlier. “While improvising the portion with the four lovers at an actors’ workshop, I felt they needn’t talk — they could convey everything with their bodies,” he explains. However, the fan of dancers like Sasha Waltz and Akram Khan, couldn’t find anyone he liked in the Indian contemporary scene to assist him — until he watched a performance by Diya Naidu in 2015. And just like that he found his choreographer, and his Hermia.
According to Kumar, the production came together democratically; he even gave up some directorial control. “Since dance was involved, I couldn’t possibly tell them how to explore that. So Diya took on the lover’s segment,” he chuckles. The play also goes beyond movement — the scene where the king invites a theatre troupe of village bumpkins to perform has words; just that they are gibberish. Kumar often uses invented dialects as he feels language works “more on the level of its texture, phonetics and the use of sound”. And while the sets are stark (he’s tried to stay away from the play’s traditional deep night blue to create the dreamlike quality in white), the music is rich and quite surprising. “On a recent visit to Spain, I heard some fantastic dubstep that resonated with me,” says Kumar, who brought in composer Anurag Shanker to compose the electronic score that is performed live on stage.
Meanwhile, the 50-year-old confesses that the play has inspired him to hit the gym, lose eight kilos and take up contact improvisation (a dance form). “Probably in one of the shows I might even jump in, at the risk of breaking my bones,” he laughs. Kumar adds that while he is constantly fine-tuning Khwaab-sa — he’s currently exploring how each dancer’s individual vocabulary can enhance the scenes — he is also pondering his next work. “We are planning a Shakespeare in hard-core Punjabi, and a contact improvisational piece that may not have words,” he concludes.
August 12, at Sir Mutha Venkatasubba Rao Hall, Chennai; August 19, at Chowdiah Memorial Hall, Bengaluru, and August 26, at Ravindra Bharathi, Hyderabad.
Loretta
Language, and its cultural conflicts and politics, forms the fodder for Sunil Shanbag’s directorial. Set on an island, Loretta revolves around a young woman who is asked to learn the local language by her lover’s father, if she wished to stay back. “It is a relevant topic at a time when one language is being imposed in a country with a diverse language map like India,” says Shanbag, of the love story that is underlined by concerns of identity.
His love for collaborations is also clear in this play: produced by Arpana Theatre, it is written by Konkani poet-screenwriter Pundalik Naik, adapted into English by director-writer Milind Dhaimade and also features stand-up comedian Varun Grover. Presented in the tiatr format, the director clarifies it is an interpretation of the traditional Goanese theatre form, using “iconic elements such as the curtains, live music and satirical side shows (that come in between acts)”.
Told in six scenes, Loretta is synoptic — with each scene giving a sense of completion. The soundscape has flavours of typical Konkani music, jazz and melody. “Much of the music is in the side shows (on language chauvinism, of being exclusive and not inclusive, and other cultural views). It could be as simple as a singer belting out numbers. We have also positioned our band on the stage (unlike tiatr , where it is in the pit) and the actors interact with them,” he explains, adding that the set comprises 40-foot curtains depicting Goan houses, kitchens and architecture. “This is typical of tiatr . The hand-painted curtains are pulled up and down once the scene is over.”
August 13, at Sir Mutha Venkatasubba Rao Hall.
Barff
Serendipity has as much a role to play in this two-hour production, as ingenuity. When Saurabh Shukla heard writer-director Ranjit Kapoor’s “very short story” — about a doctor in Kashmir who encounters a series of bizarre incidents when he visits a patient one night — he thought it would make a good feature film. He bought the rights and spent five years finalising the script. However, when he was asked to stage a play for the National School of Drama’s Bharat Rang Mahotsav last year, he decided to adapt the story for the stage. “ Barff isn’t a simple thriller. I deliberated on the setting, the reason behind the incidents, the ideology and the voice of the play,” he says.
Shukla and set designer Raghav Prakash Mishra also spent a lot of time getting the visual canvas just right — to give audiences the feeling they are seeing a snowy, mountainous region. “On Broadway, they use snow machines that are silent (unlike the noisy ones used on Hindi film sets), but it would have been impractical to get them from the US,” he says, adding Mishra built the silent machines instead.
Also starring Sadiya Siddiqui and Sunil Talwar — whose talents he’s in awe of — Shukla says he has managed to evoke a sense of realism in narration in Barff that is reminiscent of American theatre of the ’60s. “I admire (Arthur) Miller and was touched when, after watching the play, Anita Oberoi said it felt like a ‘classical theatre’,” says the actor-director, who likes to explore different genres and still plans on pursuing Barff as a film.
August 18, at Chowdiah Memorial Hall, Bengaluru, and August 25, at Ravindra Bharathi, Hyderabad.
A Friend’s Story
Themes of love and sexuality interplay in this play written by Vijay Tendulkar. Set in and around a college campus in Pune, it is a love triangle that is ahead of its time. According to director Akash Khurana, it addresses same-sex love, obsession, jealousy, betrayal and a search for redemption. “It is one of Tendulkar’s least-performed plays. It was interesting to explore it in the context of the present times,” he says, adding there were mixed reactions about “the subject being not palatable”. Set in the ’40s, the English adaptation has been translated by Gowri Ramnarayan, carrying “her modern sensibilities”. “The play is quite post modern; the adaptation was an attempt to make it more accessible,” says Khurana, assuring it isn’t pedantic. “Tendulkar is a skilled craftsman, and while the language is literary and esoteric, it can also go raw and violent.” Minimalist, shorn of elaborate sets, the production promises some interesting light and sound designs.
August 18, at Museum Theatre.
No Rest In The Kingdom
Directed by Deepika Arwind and produced by Bengaluru-based The Sandbox Collective, the play explores how gender colours our reactions in sub-conscious ways. “This is something I was preoccupied with and I was curious to see how it would translate as a performance. It started as an attempt to have a dialogue about the gendered aggressions I’ve experienced or have heard of,” says the director, writer and performer of the solo show. It relies on simple tools such as personal stories and interviews with friends. “There are four different characters that come and go. All speak fairly the same language of consumerism and technology, and have their own eccentricities,” she says, adding, “It is telling of who we are. Even artists and progressive friends, who we think are liberal, can be extremely biased. I am very interested in finding the subtle underplay of this.”
August 19, at Museum Theatre.
Snapshots of a Fervid Sunrise
“Set during the freedom struggle, the play explores how two people who believed in the same thing, went about achieving it in different ways, but without losing sight of the final goal. It’s an idea that I feel needs reflection now considering how polarised we are in today’s political context,” explains Dushyanth Gunashekar of Crea Shakthi. The play, which was written by Mahesh Dattani, follows the stories of Khudiram Bose and Thillaiyadi Valliammai, who became martyrs as teenagers but have been forgotten in the pages of history. “I made it a monologue because I wanted to represent their single soul on stage,” says the director, adding it is also a physically intensive performance that incorporates forms like Bharatnatyam, silambam and kalari.
August 20, at Museum Theatre
Black with ‘Equal’
Vickram Kapadia says his play, Black with ‘Equal’ — produced by theatre group, Masque — was born in three seconds of silence. “I was attending an annual general meeting (AGM) of a building society in Mumbai, when a lady indignantly refused to stop celebrating Bakri Eid in the building premises as it was part of their religion,” the director says. “The AGM that had been going on for a while, with its predictable disputes, suddenly came to a standstill with a highly-pregnant silence. The slender, secular mask worn by us in urban India was peeled off enough for a glimpse of our fears, prejudices and bigotry to show through. My play was born in those few seconds of silence.”
Replete with black humour (which looks at serious subjects in a satirical way), Kapadia, who wrote and directed the play, describes it “as a hilarious and hard-hitting hungama”. With a 15-member cast — including Kapadia, and others like Dinyar Tirandaz, Raja Sevak, Jayesh More, and Seema Mishra — the 120-minute production has also experimented with set design — “it is turned the other way round in the second half,” says Kapadia.
August 20, at Chowdiah Memorial Hall, Bengaluru, and August 24, at Ravindra Bharathi, Hyderabad.
— With inputs from Mini Anthikad Chhibber and Sangeetha Devi Dundoo
Tickets (for all shows at Sir Mutha Hall, and Bengaluru and Hyderabad) at ₹700, ₹500 and ₹250, and season passes at ₹1,400 and ₹1,000, on thehindu.com/tickets2017. Tickets (for all shows at Museum Thatre) at ₹250, and season passes at ₹600. An early bird offer of 20% is available on all individual tickets. Call 7299911222 (from 10 am to 5 pm) for more details.
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