What can unfold in 10 minutes? A joke, a confession, an argument, maybe even a lifetime. At Short+Sweet South India, the regional edition of the world’s largest festival of 10-minute plays, brevity is not a constraint but a provocation. Now in its 11th year, the festival returns with over 50 plays spread across three weeks, spanning comedy, tragedy, satire, movement pieces, musicals, and even experimental forms rooted in Tamil folk traditions. Each evening presents a new lineup, each play lasts no longer than a coffee break, and every performance competes for both audience votes and jury recognition.
“The spirit of Short+Sweet is exactly that, it’s short and sweet. Like having a nice lozenge, which stays in your mouth. Not a full meal but something that leaves a charming aftertaste,” says Ranvir Shah, festival producer and founder trustee of Prakriti Foundation. For him, the format mirrors the pace of the times: “You are not necessarily stuck with one long play that you may or may not enjoy; instead, when you leave the theatre, you carry with you eight to 10 different memories and ideas spanning politics, gender, art, and the simple fun of comedy. It works beautifully in this age of reels and social media.”
If the 10th edition celebrated a decade, the 11th looks forward. “This year is about taking a new direction towards a more sustainable theatre scene that supports newer and younger talent. Not just on stage, but off stage and on the technical front as well,” says Harish Subramanian, festival manager. He describes the festival as a “community exercise” that has remained true to its ethos even as it has grown.
Week one of this year’s edition has already set the tone. And directors give us a glimpse of what’s to come in the upcoming weeks.
Krishna Kumar, actor and director, has a busy lineup this year. “The play I’m acting in is A.D. 33, directed by Charles Britto. It’s about what if the Crucifixion and the consequent Ascension never happened, because a kind-hearted, petty thief, Joshua, whisks Jesus off the cross while the guards are napping post-nailing! I play Joshua. It’s a hilarious short with a lot of heart and good-natured satire, written by Simon Wheat from Australia.”
On the play he’s directing, Quantum Entanglements, Krishna says, “It’s an almost sitcom-style comedy, written by Barry Wood from the UK. Erwin Schrödinger of Schrödinger’s Cat fame and his wife go to a relationship counselor because of a birthday gift he gave her. Consequences follow, sparks ignite… but between whom?”
On risk-taking, he explains, “If you can call it a risk, I’m trying to play Quantum Entanglements slightly risqué, adding physicality to an otherwise dialogue-oriented script. I’m playing the lines as they are... no cuts. Most S+S 10-minute plays are written to be 10 minutes. But Indian delivery patterns can stretch them to 10.30–12 minutes! I work on enunciation and pronunciation so the English play sounds as English as it should, just as Hindi or Tamil should sound native.”
He adds, “I’d never strip another playwright’s work to its essence and reduce it to a travesty. My job is to be true to the playwright’s vision. I respect the wit of the work. Stage is not a place for verbal diarrhoea, however funny; theatre must show people’s lives, their rich world, sadness, happiness, and interactions. I choose scripts that give ample scope for creating an audio-visual picturesque world within 10 minutes. Ten minutes or two hours, our efforts must remain optimal.”
For Bhavya Balantrapu, who helms Mother, May I?, the play explores a woman torn between keeping her unplanned pregnancy and aborting it. She comes to a tree where her mother’s ashes have been scattered, hoping for guidance. Bhavya explains, “It’s a story about mothers, daughters, and their complex yet deep relationship. It’s about inherited guilt and reclaiming agency. Without being preachy, I also try to find humour in painful moments.”
On the risks of staging the play, she says, “I’m attempting shadow play to give a feeling of magic realism. Trying to show abstract visuals with conviction so the audience buys into it too.” And on the ten-minute format: “It forces you to remove all details that don’t move your story forward, shaving it down to its tightest form. Cutting isn’t too painful, except for jokes. My plays often use humour to balance the emotional weight, so trimming them feels serious.”
Her cast, she notes, adds to the story’s authenticity: “I wanted a mother-daughter combination for this play, Mona Bedre and her daughter Vibha Bedre, and Keerthana PV leads, balancing emotion and humour perfectly. Adding to this, our vocalist Shreya Ramnath elevates every moment with her voice.”
Bhavya sums up her philosophy: “I don’t aim to impress the audience, but to make them feel. I love plays that make people laugh and cry. If even one person tears up or leaves having new conversations triggered by the play, then it has lingered.”
Movement becomes metaphor in Sneha Sesh’s Oru Sunflower Story, where the ensemble forms petals of a sunflower on stage. “In such a short play, it’s not just about words,” she says. “The body becomes language. It’s about asking the audience to feel before they fully process. I wanted the sunflower to be both literal and symbolic, a reminder of resilience, but also the fragility of nature and relationships. Ten minutes is not a lot of time, but when bodies move together, you can create something larger than life.”
Sneha explains, “I’ve been obsessing about this play for close to seven months. Originally, it was written as a one-person monologue, but now I have eight people in it. The script hasn’t changed much; it’s the direction that’s evolved. I wanted to experiment with how the story could be told through movement, music, and ensemble work.”
Rhythm takes a different shape in Juvith Arthi Senthamizh Selvan’s A Song on Online Dating, a modern “Villu Paatu” exploring a girl’s journey through online dating. Juvith explains, “Online dating fascinated me because it mirrors the unpredictability of human relationships on stage. I felt it was the perfect theme to explore by blending music with theatre, shaping my stage experience into something fresh and contemporary.” “Our task was to compress music, rhythm, and story, to make pauses and beats work within 10 minutes,” she notes. “With villu paatu, the pauses are as important as the lines. You’re building tension, laughter, recognition, all within seconds. The challenge was balancing humour with honesty. We wanted to remind the audience that even ancient forms can hold space for very contemporary anxieties about dating, loneliness, and connection.”
Juvith highlights a moment she can’t wait for the audience to see: “There’s an instant when the main character truly sees herself and simply exists, raw and unfiltered. It’s a truth that many women in the audience can recognize in their own lives. That’s pure theatre for me, when the stage becomes a mirror for the audience.”
Kael Theatre’s Cinema F’Aan’tasy, a biting satire on patriarchal cinema, parodies iconic film moments with dancers and live prop-making, including a handmade vintage camera. R Jayachandran, writer-director of the play, explains, “Short+Sweet is really a festival for the theatre group, meetings, rehearsals, costumes and props, getting the opportunity to meet all artists and writers of different theatre groups. It’s like Diwali, Christmas, Ramzan, or a native oor thiruvizha.”
On the concept behind the play, he adds, “We are presenting a direct satire on cinema’s patriarchy, imagining what happens if women made stories about the common man, not the heroic cinematic male. The female directors shaped the narrative, and we condensed it to 10 minutes without losing humour or punch.”
He concludes, “Though the play is funny, the storylines reflect real societal issues like violence, women’s safety, and social justice wrapped in humour so audiences laugh, connect, and think. That’s the beauty of Short+Sweet: in 10 minutes, you can entertain and provoke reflection.”
Shulaja Chetlur reflects on her evolving journey at Short+Sweet. “This is my third time at Short+Sweet — twice before as a performer, once as a producer and now, for the first time, as writer-director and producer. The festival and its weekend gatherings are always charged with creativity, adventure, and experimentation.” She adds, “Short+Sweet South India has been my stage as a performer, and now it becomes my launchpad as a writer-director. There’s no better place to dive into theatre with creativity, adventure, and fearless experimentation.”
These plays hint at the range of what Short+Sweet makes possible, memory pieces, musical riffs, movement-based theatre, satire. Each a world compressed into 600 seconds.
Harish points to a “clear pivot toward inclusivity” in the curation this year: “Romance and comedy are still staples, but they’ve become more layered with details of everyday life and questions of social justice. We’re seeing more stories of women, by women, queer narratives, and explorations of smaller joys that often go unnoticed.”
As the festival heads into its second and third weeks, it invites Chennai to step into that laboratory of compression. Ten minutes might seem slight, but as this year’s participants show, it can be enough for guilt to haunt, a flower to bloom, a song to linger, or a satire to bite. Like a spark that becomes fire, these brief plays remind us how much can unfold in the smallest span of time. After all, brevity is the soul of wit.
₹250 onwards. On till September 21. Wildcard shows at 2 pm, and Top 30 shows at 7 pm. At Alliance Française of Madras, Nungambakkam.