Jagriti Theatre announces a six-month long festival starting December.
Jagriti Theatre’s first season will give theatre lovers a chance to be part of a unique festival that will ensure participation from all those keen on attending it — the festival will run for six months from December this year to June 2012. To celebrate 30 years of existence, Jagriti Theatre will showcase a collection of six plays by playwrights and theatre companies from India, UK and the US along with mainstream theatre with the aim to reach a wider audience.
Each production will have 18 shows spanning over two-and-a-half weeks and three weekends. While the season passes are priced at Rs 2,500 from Tuesday to Thursday and Rs 4,200 for Friday and Saturday, the Sunday pass with two shows is priced at Rs 3,500. People also have the option to book tickets for the entire season and watch plays on days that are convenient to them. The season tickets are priced to value and sold in advance— the money raised from these would ensure that the artists get paid in advance.
“This will support Jagriti’s resident artists and all funds will be reinvested to help in the education and outreach programmes,” says Raja, director (development), Jagriti. The artists from UK often work at pubs during off-season — only about 4 per cent of them depend only on theatre to make ends meet. The situation is much worse in India, says Raja.
Similar to the Edinburgh International Festival that takes place over three weeks and brings together artists and performers from across the world, Jagriti season will also give the audience an opportunity to interact with artists as well as those involved backstage.
The festival, which will see plays from classics to contemporary, will begin with the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes’s Lysistrata — a hilarious account of a woman’s struggle to end the Peloponnesian War and bring her husband home, preferably in one piece. What do men want, apart from war and money? One of her many comic efforts involve a sex strike in which she also engages her sisters.
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Lysistrata is a modern Indian adaptation of one of the few surviving plays of Aristophanes. The originaly was performed in Athens in 411 BC.
The lineup for the six months is interesting. In January, one can watch The Golden Dragon written by German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig — a funny and theatrical fable of modern life and migration which will whisk you away from your local takeaway to east Asia and back, revealing what really goes into that bowl of spicy soup. In February, it’s Siddharth Kumar’s The Interview by Akvarious Productions. Winner of four Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards, The Interview is hailed by critics as “a tightly-packed action comedy” with “brilliant contemporary writing”.
March will be reserved for Girish Karnad’s The Dreams of Tipu Sultan directed by Arundhati Raja and presented by Jagriti. After a month’s break in April, May will bring Anita Nair’s A Twist of Lime directed by Raja again. Finally, June will be for Donald Margulies’ Shipwrecked.
Of the six plays, the theatre has managed to land sponsors for five — the plays have a sponsorship of Rs 3 lakh each. Jagriti is still in search for a sixth sponsor.