The seven-week ban on new movie releases in bangalore, together with the hangover of my final years at college, has turned me into a theatre buff. It took me some time to dig out solutions to solitude over empty weekends, once I was done with the essential pub-hopping and stuff... Bangalore threatened to bore me to death. Then I found a couple of cultural centres in town that host plays occasionally - Alliance Francaise and Max Meuller Centre. While by no means comparable to NCPA or Prithvi, I was happy to make do with 'em.
About a month back I watched a play at Alliance - Evam Indrajit - it was a brilliant brilliant play - a combination of an abstract theme, flirting with metaphysical dilemma captured by a script and performance in simple terms.. and it was very fast paced... The actors switched back and forth into different characters, yet their parts were effortlessly lucid and distinguishable.
...I could go on; you should watch it if you get a chance. The play has been translated from Bengali by Girish Karnad. It's a pity that there was so sparse an audience.
Another day I teamed up with Potty, Parul and others to watch another play called The Final Rehearsal. We took the front row, and while we were waiting for it to begin, there comes Girish Karnad himself and quietly slips into the seat right next to me! And i went paranoid.. checking my phone (which i had already switched off) every ten seconds to ensure it hadn't switched on by itself and wouldn't ring out loud in the middle of the play! :)) Guess Karnad is kind of a mentor to the actor-director of the play. Well, this one was a one-man play, brilliantly acting. It's not in the must-watch league, but was enjoyable all the same... you could check it out sometime.
Around that time the city was beginning to turn theatre-crazy, with a bounty of plays by groups from Bombay, and two back-to-back theatre festivals... A new dedicated theatre called Ranga Shankara has just opened in town now, which promises to be the Prithvi of Bangalore... And their month-long inaugural festival, backed by a tremendous publicity campaign by hutch people, is running to full houses. I couldn't get tickets to any english or hindi plays even a fortnight in advance. But there are some nice platform performances happening. Watched a couple of these last week.
More will follow from the theatre circles of Bangalore on this blog...
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