When theatre director Sunil Shanbag first read Julius Hay’s 1962 play The Horse in the 1980s, he recalls being immediately drawn to its humour. Now, more than 40 years later, he has finally brought the Hungarian playwright’s biting allegory alive on stage. First performed in Mumbai last month, the play comes to Delhi this weekend at Kamani Auditorium under the Aadyam Theatre banner.
Shanbag, an established name in Mumbai’s theatre hub, says performing in Delhi is something he looks forward to. “Delhi audiences have always received us warmly. There’s a wonderful openness to new work here, an excitement when work comes from outside,” he says.
The Horse is set in Rome and is centered around the cruel and megalomaniac Caligula, who ruled Rome between AD 37 and 41. The play opens in a tavern, where the emperor and his subjects gather for gambling. One night, a young boy, Selanus, arrives clutching his belongings. Soon, he loses them to the gamblers, and his final possession, a dapple-grey horse named Incitatus, is put up as a desperate wager. That bet sets off a riotous chain of events that questions Caligula’s authority and Rome’s sanity.
Although set in Rome and inspired by a real ruler, Hay’s play is far from historical realism. “It is an allegory. You could poke holes in it historically, but that’s not the point. It’s a vehicle,” Shanbag explains, adding that his production stays true to Hay’s text. “What attracted me was the way Hay used comedy as a vehicle for satire. We don’t see enough of that in the theatre.”
Beyond its humour, Shanbag’s liking for Hay’s text is also tied to his travels through eastern Europe and to 1970s Mumbai, where theatre circles were staging such playwrights in Marathi and English. “Dubey had done plays by Slawomir Mrozek and others, Anmol Vellani staged Václav Havel,” Shanbag recalls, thinking back to his days working with the legendary Satyadev Dubey.
Even if comedy is an entry point, Shanbag is quick to note that it is not easy to make an audience laugh. “Comedy requires special skills — comic timing and a tongue-in-cheek kind of attitude. And because we don’t see enough comedy, you have to really look for performers trained to pull it off.”
Why it matters
The play examines authority, greed, ambition, and absurdity through the lens of Caligula’s reign, making it travel well across decades and continents. Hay’s satire, Shanbag argues, lands harder today than when it was first written. “In a post-COVID-19 world, things are far starker today. We live in a post-truth era. Truth is manipulated all the time, sometimes blatantly ignored. we start believing it simply because it’s said with confidence. The Horse shows how easily we buy into myths, how quickly we abandon rationality and sway as a population. That feels even sharper today.”
“The references, even in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and even now, the ideas and the issues he brings up in the play are still very contemporary,” adds Shanbag.
With The Horse, Shanbag transforms the stage into a mirror of our times, reflecting celebrity obsession, institutional erosion, and the delusions of leadership. “One of theatre’s roles is to hold a mirror to our times. The Horse does that beautifully, and it does it joyously. You get the point, but you also feel uplifted.”
Epic staging
Shanbag’s production stages a large ensemble of 20 actors, including actor Akash Khurana as Caligula and Neil Bhoopalam as the young Selanus. The original text called for an expansive cast, and even after cuts, this is Shanbag’s largest production yet. His previous play Barricade (written by Utpal Dutt, based on the 1933 Nazi takeover of Germany) had 12 actors.
Working with so many performers, he admits, is “exciting and exhausting”. “But I love a rehearsal room full of people. This was an opportunity to work with many actors I had long wanted to collaborate with,” Shanbag says. A large-scale production, he adds, also allows for an evocative space, with “beautiful costumes, music, and set design.”
One of Shanbag’s key additions to Hay’s text is music — penned by voice artist and lyricist Asif Ali Beg, with compositions by Kaizad Gherda. “The original play had just one song. Music works at a different level from text. It appeals to a different part of your brain. Music can highlight certain things that mere words can’t, and it adds a layer to the play that wasn’t there in the written text,” notes Shanbag.
Theatre survives
In 2025, when short-form content — reels, shorts, and bingeable series — dominates storytelling, what does long-form theatre offer? Shanbag has two answers. “First, the shared experience. Six hundred strangers walk into a theatre, but when they leave, they’re no longer strangers. They’ve been through something together. That’s why theatre is so invigorating and powerful.”
The second is liveness. “In an era of AI, watching human beings, flesh and blood, perform something right in front of you, that has an energy no screen can replicate. People have been predicting theatre’s death for decades: when TV came, when streaming came. But theatre has survived. There’s resilience there.”
The play will be staged at Kamani Auditorium, Mandi House, on Saturday, September 6, at 7.30 pm, and on Sunday, September 7, at 4 pm and 7.30 pm. For tickets, check www.district.in.
This article is written by Adithi Reena Ajith