Pandemic theatre groups gearing up for offline shows

They say they are more comfortable with technology, social media promotions, and alternative spaces of performance

A couple of new theatre groups took off in Bengaluru during the pandemic, operating virtually and rehearsing offline when the cases fell. As performance venues open to the public and theatre veterans bring their batch of shows to stage, do these newbies, mostly run by working professionals out of their passion for theatre, find themselves outdone? Metrolife asked a few.

Works in progress

“We are very much around and doing well,” Aashish Rana, an associate manager with an MNC, said about Theatrenama, which he founded in November 2021 with Kanishka Joshi, who works in a startup.

Their adaptation of Ajay Shukla’s 1993 play ‘Tajmahal Ka Tender’ ran houseful across two slots on Sunday, he claims. “We did not think people would want to watch anything but ‘KGF 2’ over the weekend,” he laughs. Last month too, their show of ‘Bali Aur Shambhu’, written by Manav Kaul, fell in the same week as the mega film ‘RRR’ but Aashish claims they managed to “make Rs 25,000 profit”.

Colleges and offices are slowly reopening but Aashish says that hasn’t dented the numbers of his cast and crew much or the time they devote to theatre. He has a circle of 40 people in the 17-53 age group.

The group is currently working on four Hindi plays. “A lot of theatre groups are making contemporary plays but we want to focus on cult classics as they draw first-time theatre goers easily,” he explains.

Unlike Aashish, economics professor Gaurav Jakhu wants to put out original dramas and “untapped contemporary issues like corporate culture and data privacy”. And Talab, a group he formed with entrepreneur Richa Bajpai this February, is already on to one. “We will stage ‘Suits & Lies’ in May. It is about four employees of a consulting firm and how they deal with a morally questionable project,” he shares. The group was initially doing script readings on Zoom but now offline rehearsals have begun.

Amit Aggarwal started Avchetan Theatre in November 2020 because the offline theatre had fallen silent and he needed a vent for the theatre bug in him. Soon after, he got seasoned artistes to read Girish Karnad’s historical Kannada drama ‘Tughlaq’ online. The next plan was to stage ‘Hattamalar Oparey’, a Bengali play by Badal Sircar, but the second wave hit, and some actors left for Kolkata, their hometown. “Now I am translating the play in Hindi as ‘Hattamala Ke Us Paar' and plan to stage it in July with a mix of old and new actors,” informs Amit, who works in the IT industry.

Long-time theatre practitioner Mayura Baweja has started a solo venture, which she wants to kick off by doing staged readings of plays from foreign languages. This, she hopes, will introduce the Bengaluru audience to “new writings”. She has curated stories in Spanish, Indonesian, and Latin-American and is looking for another before she can open them to the public.

Post-Covid trends

These groups started in the pandemic era. Technology was their first ground for ideation, rehearsals, performance and audience interaction. As we ease into some normalcy, how are they adapting to the transition?

Mayura says “stage readings are an attractive format” in the post-Covid world, where the threat of a fourth wave still looms. “You don’t need too many actors to rehearse for a long period of time together. Or, people construct sets. The loss, in any event of cancellation, will be less,” she explains.

She says “the pandemic has shifted something within each of us” and so, the subjects she will choose, how she will depict them and where, may shift too. Going forward, we can expect to see more site-specific performances and alternate performance spaces, which “will enrich theatre”, says Mayura.

Given the uncertainties around the Covid outbreak, Amit says now they have a smaller window to recover the costs. This calls for targeted promotions. “We are now posting show announcements on Facebook and WhatsApp groups of gated communities. For ‘Tughlaq’, we live-streamed it on our Facebook page and reposted it on literature and college groups” he says. “We need to write plays in a manner that can be adapted for online viewing effectively if the need comes,” he adds.

Aashish shares his strategy, “We want to stage more plays with fewer shows. This will guarantee variety. Earlier, theatre groups were at liberty to stage the concepts they wanted to but today, we need to give our audience what they would like. Only then will they come back to theatres,” he says.