Playwright Prashanth Nair realised while talking to his mother one day that while his grandmother had so many fairy tales to tell, surprisingly his generation does not have any. “I wondered if it is because we live in cities and don’t believe in magic,” he tells us. This is what sparked the idea that later became the script for Remember Remember, a series of stories reimagined and written as urban folktales.
The play starts with the story Watching an Audience Watch a Play where the actors play the role of an audience and it kind of introduces the concept of the play. The other stories are The Gatekeeper of Secrets, ZenTen, The Pied Piper Remembers, Everybody Needs an Imaginary Friend and The Woman who Lost her Stories. The plots range from an app that allows you to travel back in time by ten seconds, childhood imaginary friends to a mystical place that is a prison for stories.
“All the stories have a magical element, not in the childlike sense of fairytales, but more in the sense of technology or ambitions,” Prashanth explains. All the stories are set in urban spaces and have an element of legend or fairy tales in them. “We wanted to explore whether cities can contain stories or if they too just fast-paced to hold on to tales,” he sums up eloquently.
October 11 and 12. At Ranga Shankara, JP Nagar, 7.30 pm. Tickets (Rs. 200) on bookmyshow.com