Let the festivities begin

For the theatre fraternity in Mumbai, the festival of lights don’t signify the welcoming of Lord Ram from his exile, but rather, they signify the welcoming of ‘new’ plays to the city’s theatre-scape. Most performing companies spend the monsoon preparing for the premiere of new plays at the various theatre festivals that occupy the last two months of the year. Similarly, audiences are saving up (or so we hope) for the deluge of new productions that are unleashed onto the city, at the time.

The Mumbai theatre scene is active round the year, but in what might be a result of sugar high from excess Diwali sweets, there is a flurry of extra activity. Between November and December there are four major festivals that happen: each one introducing new and exciting work to the city’s hungry audiences.

The oldest and the most respected of these is the Prithvi Festival, which has often served the purpose of injecting new ideas into the local theatre scene. Almost a decade ago, their Kala Desh ki Seva Mein theme introduced the city to soulful and powerful work about injustice and inequality, while still maintaining a high aesthetic value. The musical festival of a few years ago unearthed so many singer-actors that a whole new genre of Indian musicals (not the Broadway kind) have now become the norm.

Productions like Ladies Sangeet, Ishq Aaha, Stories in a Song, Piya Behrupiya, Loretta, and Maro Piyo Gaye Rangoon have become huge successes, without necessarily having an over-riding theme. These are usually by the senior groups, who are part of the regular roster at Prithvi. Therefore it’s not unusual for Naseeruddin Shah or Makrand Deshpande or Nadira Zaheer-Babbar to premiere their new production for the year here.

Hot on the heels of the Prithvi Festival comes Literature Live! (full disclosure: it's curated by me). While it is a literature festival, it does have a strong performance section, usually inspired by writers, books or new ways of story-telling. The line-up this year has work from Canada, the UK, and Australia, along with local representation from Chandigarh, Mumbai and Delhi.

Soon after comes the other ‘premiering’ festival, NCPA’s Centre Stage, which has found its home in the first week of December. The festival started small, but has become a showcasing opportunity for many of the younger troupes, the non-stalwarts as it were. Each year, the line-up has got more and more interesting, and a number of last year’s plays have become favourites, like 7/7/7 and Gentleman’s Club.

Rounding off the quartet is Thespo, the annual festival of the youth theatre movement. This is almost always in the second week of December. Now in its 18th edition, it rivals only Prithvi's for longevity, but has probably the most defined curatorial process. The work showcased is exclusively by performers and creators under the age of 25, and is shortlisted from a two-month nationwide screening process.

The season begins tomorrow night with the inauguration of the Prithvi Festival, which will feature 13 new plays, talks with legends, and short performances curated by various theatre people. Although only a fortnight long, for many it is the beginning of a two-month-long celebration.

Sam Kerawala once famously articulated what many of us were feeling, when he said, “Theatre is my religion.” So for us November and December is truly our festive season and it has nothing to do with Diwali or Christmas.

The writer is a Mumbai-based theatre-holic. He works for arts management company QTP, and is also associated with youth theatre movement Thespo.