Column: Bengaluru Theatre Reviews

I am overwhelmed, and must take time to draw breath, step back a little, and consider, before starting to write this review. Quite an unusual thing for me; I usually have the ability to stand a step apart from the play I am watching, in order to give a more objective, less impassioned review of what I have seen and experienced. But on Tuesday, 9th October 2018 at Ranga Shankara, Sushmita Mukherjee, the well-known film and television actress, took a firm hold of our eyes and minds, and yanked us off on an intense roller coaster ride. She held us spellbound,…

To write a play that deals with a highly technical scientific topic, and to bring that play to life on the stage, are two very difficult tasks indeed.  Bangalore Little Theatre (BLT)  took on this challenge as part of their series, the History of Ideas programme. "Photograph 51" is the sixteenth play in the series. This is an award-winning play by Anna Ziegler, about the race between two leading laboratories in England, in the nineteen-fifties, to crack the nature of the DNA structure. The title of the play comes from the nickname given to an X-ray diffraction image taken by…

It's a tough act to follow, when a play is a re-interpretation of a literary classic, and that, too, one written for the stage. Chitrangada, the musical dance-drama by Rabindranath Tagore, was staged in a new form by Red Polka Productions at Ranga Shankara, on Tuesday, the July 17, 2018. Having long read, watched and appreciated the literary and dramatic works of Tagore, I was eager to see what the new production would be like. The original dance-drama was written by Tagore in 1891, and is the story of Chitrangada, the only child of the king of Manipur. She is treated…

A play where one actor alone comprises the cast faces several challenges. The success of the play devolves, in large part, on the shoulders of that one actor, no matter how good the crew and the production values may be. For this reason, I am always interested in watching "monoacting" as it is called here. I went to watch 'Karl Marx in Kalbadevi' at Ranga Shankara, on 29 June 2018 in this spirit. The underlying premise of the play is that Karl Marx comes back to life, 150 years after his death, to the Mumbai suburb of Kalbadevi; he wants…

A play that is an interpretation of another play faces several challenges. What if the audience is not familiar with the original play?  How can the production pick up on very contemporary issues from a play originally written in 1972...46 years ago? The Big Fat Company addressed these issues, and more, successfully, in their production, "Head 2 Head", where the cast and crew "play" with Hayavadana. A scene from the play, in a photo  displayed in the foyer: As I entered the theatre space, I found the first attempt in this direction by the Big Fat Company.  An excellent brochure, printed…