For a city bursting with youthful energy and already famous for its vibrant local theatre, what better event than The Hindu MetroPlus Theatre Fest! For the third year running, the Theatre Fest gets ready to charm Bangalore audiences off their feet. And this time, we bring you four superb plays, each diverse in content and form.
Launched in 2005 in Chennai, the MetroPlus Theatre Fest has since grown to become a calendar event across five cities, with shows in Chennai, Kochi, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Coimbatore. We have introduced Indian audiences to performances not just from across India but from countries such as Germany, the US, Korea, Singapore and Sri Lanka.
The enthusiasm and eagerness with which audiences have received the Theatre Fest encouraged us to launch The MetroPlus Playwright Award in 2008 with a prize of Rs.1 lakh for the best English language script. We are pleased to see many of these scripts coming back to the Fest as full-fledged performances.
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This year, the line-up for Bangalore has performances from Korea, New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore’s Jagriti.
Launching the fest on August 23 is
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On August 24 Bangalore’s Jagriti presents One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest , a powerful representation of the classic book and film that captured the radical and anti-establishment mood of the 1960s. A tale set in a psychiatric ward ruled by a tyrannical nurse whose regime is challenged by newcomer McMurphy who rebels and wants to subvert the system, it evolves into a titanic battle of wills. The humorous yet disturbingly dark play stirs the imagination with a script that pushes the boundaries between freedom and constraint to great effect. Jagriti, formerly Artistes’ Repertory Theatre, is the resident theatre company of Jagriti Theatre, a performance arts space in Whitefield, and was founded by Arundhati and Jagdish Raja. The theatre group celebrates its 30th anniversary this year.
Next up on August 25 is Miss Julie from Delhi’s Katyayani Theatre Group. Written by Swedish playwright August Strindberg, it is a complex take on class and gender conflicts. A young upper-class girl named Julie has an affair with a man servant to escape the suffocating social mores of her cloistered existence, which soon escalates into a battle for power, with the lines between the sides finely and indelibly drawn. The play, written in 1888, deals with issues of love, lust, the battle of the classes and the sexes and is still hugely relevant for today’s audiences. Says Sohaila Kapur, director, “Nineteenth century Sweden is relevant to twenty-first century India, where there is a loosening of social and sexual taboos, but not without its pitfalls.” Katyayani has been performing plays since 1994 with some of Delhi top talents.
Finally, we have Mumbai’s famous Akvarious Productions with Baghdad Wedding . It is introduced intriguingly with the line “In Iraq, a wedding is not a wedding unless shots are fired.” The winner of three Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards including Best Play and Best Ensemble, it is London-based Iraqi Hassan Abdulrazzak’s first play. It covers an enormous amount of territory, travelling from cosmopolitan London to the chaos of war-ravaged Baghdad. Telling the tale of three friends who return to their native Iraq, it is a story of people torn between two worlds, who grapple with their cultural, political and sexual identities. In the last 11 years, Akvarious Productions has staged over 35 plays covering a wide range of genres and languages and director Akarsh Khurana has a reputation of delivering finely nuanced productions.