It’s a space invasion!

Experimental theatre is staging a coup of sorts in metros where plays and actors are stepping onto busy streets, old bungalows and even under the old banyan tree, finds RASHMI VASUDEVA.

In this touch-screen age, everything is reachable, quite boringly, ‘at the click of a mouse’. The surreal has seeped into theatre too, where the audience are on the stage, hearing their stories and the actors mingle with their viewers, soaking up reactions.

Sample this: The perplexed audience in a Mumbai theatre are ushered through a wooden door, only to find themselves in pitch darkness. The expected performance is nowhere in sight. Instead come robbers who announce that they have pick-pocketed most of the assembled. The shocked audience react and the robbers respond. And thus begins the play.

Theatre of the unconventional, theatre of the wannabes, call it what you will. Alternative theatre is staging a sort of coup in metros. Once rehearsed for three months, with many joy-filled hours of goof-ups and hunger pangs, plays were complicated things — they needed a script, a harassed director, egoistic actors, lighting and auditorium. And practice, practice and more practice.

Not anymore. Ask Nandini Rao, who came into drama “just like that” and began doing playback theatre with Ratan Thakur’s theatre group Misfit (My Interest Stays Firmly In Theatre). “Playback is all about the audience. You tell your story, we act it out.”

Playback has been there for nearly a decade now but is only now peeping out. Theatre of various genres have always found their niche in Bangalore, be it traditional scripted plays, Kannada theatre, Girish Karnad’s plays or Mahesh Dattani’s productions. Of late though, the wannabe and lesser-known actors and playwrights are the ones making waves. Like the theatre group Yours Truly formed by like-minded friends who had two things in common — love for theatre and Indiranagar! A motley group, most of them in 9 to 5 jobs, they still have managed more than 40 shows.

“Playback is an improvisational theatre in which audience members tell stories from their lives. The audience is warmed up with questions like: ‘How did your first kiss feel?’ The actors then 'playback' the answer, explains Ranji David, another theatre enthusiast. Actors also illustrate life stories only if the audience are willing. “This can be quite a catharsis,” says Nandini.

If playback is going places, quite literally, new-fangled forms like ‘rough theatre’ which work without a script and street plays are also emerging out of the green room. The theatre festival at Ranga Shankara too has contributed immensely. Plays were held virtually everywhere — on the footpath, inside parks, under trees. Incidentally, Misfit also staged a series of plays keeping fidgeting audiences in mind. Titled Audience on the Mat, it features works by young playwrights. Audience on the Mat usually features humourous plays that use open spaces in shopping malls and high-rises. “We are now exploring a new wave of theatre,” says Pavan, an engineer who quit his job to do theatre and now has his own group, Actor Company Theatre.

Jagadish Raja of Artistes’ Repertory Theatre disagrees: “Experimental theatre that is happening today is somewhat superficial.” Raja, a director-actor, says unless the themes are provocative enough, street plays and playback theatre cannot make an impact.That might be so but rooftop and balcony theatre is finding its audience in eager families who arrange parties with a performance thrown in. Old bungalows in central Bangalore are the favourite haunts.

Superficial or creative, however you look at it, experimental theatre is booming in the Silicon Valley, with corporates looking to entertain and keep their employees happy. “Theatre is evolving and finding its idiom and experimental theatre is the ideal platform — it needs no props, no auditorium, mostly no make-up and thus everybody interested can try it out,” says Atul Kumar, festival director of Ranga Shankara. Ranga Shankara itself plans to invite groups that focus on alternative genres in its forthcoming youth theatre festival in December.

So the next time you are walking round that bend and come across an animated group of people under a huge tree, just join in. Who knows, you might end up being the lead actor!