The Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards (META) came back to the city on Thursday night. The festival, now in its seventh year, stands strong on its objective to encourage theatre in all Indian languages. META works as a continued effort in the direction to recognise and encourage theatre.

The festival received 268 entries this year from all across the country. From the entries, sent on recorded DVDs, a selection committee picked the 10 best productions over a period of one week of intensive screening. The selected plays are staged for public and new set of jury for awards. The 2012 jury consists of actor Darshan Jariwala, NSD chairperson Amal Allana, theatre director Ananda Lal, critic Soumik Bandyopadhyay and scribe Mukund Padmanabhan.
Ravi Dubey, creative director of META, says the transparent selection system is the USP of the festival. In 2005, when the Mahindra group contacted Dubey, he came up with this idea to weave a cordial ecosystem between the stage and the corporate world. His vision is to shift META’s viewership to the international orbit, but retain the Indian essence in terms of content and participation.
The 39 Steps, directed by Bhargav Ramakrishnan, opened the festival on Thursday night. A comic tribute to Alfred Hitchcock and his cult spy-thriller, the play is a take on the genre of larger-than-life Hollywood heroes of 1930s. Filled with theatrical devices and special effects, it showcases four actors trying to recreate the entire movie, scene to scene using nothing more than four trunks, a lamp post, a door and a window frame. The four actors get in the skin of 140 roles, recreating train-car chases, jet fights, dark moors and evil mansions.
Day two is staging two plays, Praveen Kumar Gunjan’s Hindi play Samjhouta and Ashim Kumar Sharma’s Assamese play Sup-Ek-Prahashan.
Samjhouta presents the world as circus and showcases a story of young man who is helpless in the circumstances and situations around him. The search for a job in a traditional way, the usual pain of running from one office to another highlights the play.
“Muktibodh is my favourite writer and Samjhouta appealed to me for its contemporary approach. With the help of traditional story-telling style and theatrical devices, the story is performed as a modern and contemporary theatrical piece.
Here the actor is not behaving like a tool but as a bridge between the audience and the content of the story,” says Gunjan.
Sup-Ek Prahashan is based on the regime of Raja Dharmaswar, who wants his people to ignore famine, poverty and other sufferings. But the mass revolt takes over and the king gets replaced for a new era of justice, peace and prosperity. Day three showcases Lillete Dubey’s Adhe Adhure and Sandip Bhattacharya’s Santaap. A powerful and truthful look at marriage, Hindi play Adhe Adhure, explores the themes of fragmentation and incompleteness at the individual, familial and social levels. Santaap, a Bengali play set in the backdrop of slum dwellers’ community, narrates the story of Hermaphrodites. “Santaap — a novelette by Manab Chakraborty shook my soul at its first reading, eight years ago. Do we ever consider the plight of these hermaphrodites? Are they alike nature? A whirlwind of different questions torments my mind. Do we really consider them as human being?” asks Bhattacharya in his director’s note.
Akarsh Khurana’s English play Baghdad Wedding is slotted for Sunday evening with Manish Mitra’s Bengali and English show Journey to Daakghar. From cosmopolitan London to the chaos of war-ravaged Baghdad, Khurana narrates the tale of three friends, who grapple with their cultural, political and sexual identities, torn between two worlds. “Journey to Daakghar is the journey of any person in the earth who is looking for a spiritual freedom to a space beyond death, where he is actually free from all mortal bonds,” says Mitra.
Assamese play Nagamandala, directed by Abinash Sarma, is set to entertain audiences on March 5. Nagamandala, the play with a cobra, is based on two oral Kannada folk tales. “Every production that I have been able to stage in front of the theatre lovers, tests my caliber as a theatre activist, and Nagamandala is no exception. Surrealism as it sounds indeed teases the fantasy of reality and a subject that needs a proper medium to make you carry home the message which serves the basic purpose of a staged story,” says Sarma. Manipuri play A Far Cry, revolving around the victims of insurgency, ends the festival on March 6. The play portrays the cultural elements of the various art forms of Manipur.
The award ceremony for winners in various categories is scheduled for March 7.