From school and college students to educated homemakers and service professionals, the audience for English dramas is growing in Nagpur.
The second capital of Maharashtra seems to have developed a theatrical taste for English plays with people from various walks of life seen enjoying a drama or a stage recital, opting over a television soap opera.
From school and college students to educated homemakers and service professionals, the audience for English dramas is growing in Nagpur.
The current scene is different from the situation 4-5 years ago, when it was difficult to draw people to watch a play in a language other than Hindi or Marathi and the change augurs well for the theatre industry.
According to Vikas Khurana, who is popularly known as the 'theatre guru' of Nagpur, and has founded 'Stagecraft', about six plays are produced on an average in a year by his group, with 3-4 shows of a play at a time, running to packed houses.
A disciple of Satyadev Dubey, Om Puri and Naseeruddin Shah, he is primarily responsible for introducing English theatre to Vidarbhaites in 2003 and has worked with the veterans at Prithivi Theatre in Mumbai.
"Central India is essentially a Hindi speaking belt and there are several theatre groups in all major towns and cities but all of them stage plays in regional languages like Marathi, Gujarati and Hindi. But ours is the only English theatre group. The closest English theatre is either in Pune or in Hyderabad," he told PTI.
The group works with convents, public schools and professional colleges, conducting theatre workshops and stage plays for them on a regular basis.
Khurana says theatre has to start at the grassroot level and hence he opts for schools and colleges. "There is no dearth of talent there," he said.
Khurana has acted in and directed more than 60 plays and delivered over 200 stage performances in Nagpur and Mumbai.
He began with a musical called My Fair Lady in 2003 and since then has never looked back.
Peter Pan, An evening of Three, Once Upon a Time in Bollywood, Head-n-Tales, Fatal injuries, Dangerous Curves Ahead (bedroom farce), A Mid Summer Night's dream, Aladdin, Singing in the rain, Night of January 16th, The Hotel Bombay international, William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet,Deathtrap, Ten little Indians, based on a novel of Agatha Christie, Kismat and 12 Angry People are some of the plays that followed in the years after.
Other famous plays that were staged by his group include Liar Love's On The Fire, Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, Rope, The last crime of Kamar Kumar Khanna, Tall Tales, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Alice in Wonderland, JK's Women, Enid Blyton's The Mystry of Pantomime Cat and The Haunting, Khurana said.
This year Khurana has so far acted and directed Pygmalion, Shakespeare's Macbeth, Fun on the Run and All About Women.
The amateur group has about odd 100 persons and stage plays usually on Sundays.
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