After 17 shows, Bengaluru-based Tahatto is staging their production, Remember Remember, in Chennai for the first time. With a core team of five working professionals who founded this group around a decade ago, Tahatto had previously performed in Chennai, presenting plays like Romeo & Juliet — No Strings Attached.
Remember Remember is one of their newest plays that they are keen on performing across the country, in cities like Coimbatore, Mumbai and Pune. “Our dream is to perform this play abroad too,” says Prashanth Nair, one of the founding members and the director of this play, adding that it is suitable for anyone who lives in a city and who believes that storytelling is dying in urban spaces. “It is getting harder for us to sit down and share stories,” he admits.
This is what led to the concept of Remember Remember, he informs, saying, “It’s inspired from this one
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question — do fairytales and mystical stories exist in our concrete, sterile cities too? Are we too busy to notice them? And what would it take to sit down and listen to them, as a community?”
The play, therefore, is a set of five short stories, or as they call it, ‘Urban Folktales’. “It was visualised as a book of individual short stories, with live instrumental music and dialogues in English and regional languages,” he says, adding that the predominant colours of red and black in the costumes of the eight-member cast will remain consistent throughout the play.
Out of the five stories, we find ZenTen to be the most interesting, as it revolves around an app that allows a couple to go back in time for around 10 seconds and sort their differences. The unusual ideas continue with Watching An Audience Watch A Play, where a group of actors watch an audience, instead of the other way round. The other ‘fairytale’ stories are The Pied Piper Remembers (minus the mice from the legend), Everybody Needs An Imaginary Friend and The Woman Who Lost Her Stories.
At Museum Theatre. Sunday. 7 pm. Tickets from Rs. 200 onwards.