Come October 31, the theatre aficionados of Bangalore will be treated to the resplendent and glorious tradition of Company Theatre with elements of mythology, fashion, music and colour at Ranga Shankara, a theatre-space of its kind here.
The golden era of Company Theatre, spanning a century will come alive in the ten-day theatre festival, which will bring to fore its “spectacular quality and theatricality”, Girish Karnad, a doyen of Kannada theatre said.
Company theatre, emerged as the country’s first modern commercial theatre and created what was perhaps the largest ticket-buying audience in the Indian stage history. The theatrical style was greatly influenced by Parsi theatre, Sangeet Natak and several local performance traditions.
Sharing the historical odyssey of Company Theatre with PTI, Karnad, who has also directed a number of internationally-acclaimed Kannada films, said modern Indian theatre began in the middle of the 19th century. Troupes of actors used to come from Britain to entertain the colonial ruling class in India.
The fact that the rulers indulged in this form of entertainment, gave in the eyes of the subjects, a new prestige to secular theatre, which until then had languished in disrepute as a distinctly lower class vocation.
In the 1850’s, Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, the ruler of Lucknow, danced and sang in a court production of “Inder Sabha”.
In Calcutta and Bombay of those days, the Indian entrepreneurs saw the business possibilties of theatre and formed companies which soon became the fountainhead of entertainment in cities.
