After city-based theatre company, Raffu Chakkar Entertainers’ first curtain call in Hyderabad’s Rangbhoomi Spaces a couple of weeks earlier, they are staging their Hindi play, Mad House, another time at the venue. A former IT professional working Downtown, aka, Lower Manhattan, Rafia Sultana was in awe of Broadway theatre shows amped up by live-action, oomph factor, and light-hearted themes. Moving to Hyderabad in 2010 and forming the aforesaid theatre ensemble in 2012, she shares that the art form has been her ‘first love’ for as long as she can recall. She has completed a decade in theatre and now helms the hour-and-a-half stage show, a slapstick comedy revolving around shared office spaces. At Rangbhoomi’s open stage, the characters of the play – an influencer, a dentist, a patient and others – will share an even more organic intimacy with the beholders.
“The audience can expect lots of laughter and entertainment. It has music, and comedy while promising everyone to return to their homes with good memories,” says Rafia. With the orchestration of Mad House, she also takes an about-turn from erstwhile romantic comedies like the Broadway-style Parallel Pyar, and socio-political plays like Qeemat, which underscored cybercrimes.
Hyderabad’s Rangbhoomi continues to echo a host of novel cultural activities engendered by all performing artists across the city and at large, India. The co-founder of the space and himself an actor-director, Jay Jha is set to come up on stage after a year. Now, Rangbhoomi promises to do twice as much to enliven theatre as an art. Jay who has also been in the profession for more than a decade was last seen as the rude, aggressive yet soft and loving Sakharam, the protagonist in the stage adaptation of Indian playwright Vijay Tendulkar’s Sakharam Binder. Not getting much time to devote to the stage, he decided to quit his job at an MNC earlier this month. He tells us that he will be engaging in theatre full-time.
“I was not getting the time to work as an actor as I was also managing Rangbhoomi. My first love is acting, and I was missing out on a lot,” he adds. Jay is also the co-founder of Hyderabad’s theatre troupe, Kissago, and will be seen as the monologist in its theatrical reinterpretation of Manav Kaul’s Shakkar Ke Paanch Daane (Five grains of sugar). In the feel-good Hindi narrative, Jay depicts an underdog villager in the character of Raj Kumar, whose undervalued life grips you by the heart. “I am not revising much from the original script, but only making directional changes and altering the style of performance. The play opens with a poem about finding ourselves and I am making my audience read it to me,” he shares. In this show, Jay will be involving the audience in the frame to make his piece more engrossing as he feels that monologues can get tedious.
Mad House and Shakkar Ke Paanch Daane will take place on January 28 and 29 respectively in Gachibowli.
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