It’s theatre time folks! Put aside the humdrum of your routine schedule and get ready for a weekend of unalloyed entertainment. Curtains go up on August 8 on The Hindu MetroPlus Theatre Fest, the fourth edition of this much-awaited event. The three-day festival will bring to the city a heady mix of plays, which includes a Korean production.
>Buy tickets for MPTF 2014 Kochi here.
Launched in 2005 in Chennai, the festival has grown to become a calendar event across five cities, with shows in Kochi, Hyderabad, Coimbatore and Bangalore as well. Down the years it has brought plays from across India and other countries. As Atul Kumar, one of the directors whose play is featured this edition, says, “To perform for The Hindu’s MPTF is like coming back home to our extremely informed and welcoming audiences in South India.”
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The Kochi edition will kick off with the thought-provoking play, The Peasant of El Salvador (August 8) by Q Theatre Productions, directed by Quasar Thakore Padamsee. Based on the work of Peter Gould and Stephen Stearns, the play (in English, and bits of Spanish and Hindi) is a riveting, funny and heart-warming story of a hill farmer and his family against the backdrop of the Salvadoran civil unrest of the 1970s. It tells the story of a peasant named Jesus, a man with a big heart, a big family and a small piece of land. He, like many, waits for things to change in the face of a military dictatorship, sweeping land reforms, death squads, guerrilla warfare and unprecedented repression. Three narrators take us on a journey to a time and place far removed from us.
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Next up on August 9 is the zany comedy, Noises Off, directed by Atul Kumar for The Company Theatre. Michael Frayn’s play can be said to be the ‘mother of all play-within-a-play comedies’. It is about a misplaced director and a team of mediocre actors trying to put up a sex comedy. Through the rehearsals and various shows in a run, the play and their interpersonal relationships go from bad to worse. Things reach a disastrous stage when the actors start getting injured physically, forget their lines, make wrong entries and exits, and find themselves improvising poorly to save face and probably the final show.
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The festival will take the bow with the dramatic Beyond Binary (August 10), an Indo-Korean theatre collaboration initiated by Inko Centre in India and AsiaNow Production in Korea. It is supported by Korea Foundation; commissioned by Arts Council Korea, Gangwon Cultural Foundation; and co-produced by Namsan Arts Center.
The play, in Korean, English and Tamil, is presented by Performance Group Tuida and directed by Yosup Bae.
The play explores issues of sexual orientation and identity, drawing inspiration from Indian mythology. It was developed after a series of interviews in India and Korea. The performers explore the relationship between dance and theatre with live Korean and Indian music. The play aims to examine how sexual identity is collectively created, defined, reiterated and restrained by social, religious, and political contexts. It premiered at the Namsan Art Center, Seoul in April 2014.
All three plays will be staged at Kerala Fine Arts Hall, Ernakulam. All plays start at 7.30 p.m.
>See the full MPTF 2014 schedule here
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