When Captain Kirk uttered those immortal words, he could well have been talking about performance venues in Mumbai. Maximum City has always had real estate problems. In spite of being India’s busiest theatre city, it doesn’t have an adequate number of performance spaces.

Earlier this month I toured with a play to South India. The Metroplus Theatre Festival in is an incredibly successful initiative making it an important destination for Indian and international theatre performers. The festival is hosted at the new Sri Mutha Venkatasubba Rao Concert Hall, a swanky large 1,000-seater proscenium theatre with a huge stage and effective lighting rig. What is special about the space is not just the facilities, but the attitude the management has: making sure the work featured is priority. The detailing, the practical decisions are all quite remarkable. It is also the only space in India (that I am aware of) that actually has a black floor, to aid the lighting designers.
However, not all is gold at this venue, the seats are more suited for cinema than theatre. The viewing experience of the two mediums is very different. In a cinema, the relationship to the film is a one to one experience. You want to feel that the audience doesn’t exist, and the characters in the film just talking to you. You sink into the seats and are almost unaware as to how many people there are until the queue forms at the exit.
Theatre is different. It is a far more communal experience. As a viewer you are part of a whole. Each member of the audience is aware of his fellow members. It is also why during a theatre performance oftentimes the audience reacts as a one. It is a shared experience. But this a small blemish in an otherwise wonderfully caring space.
Our next halt was Bengaluru. We played at the six-year-old RangaShankara. A small 300-seater, it is almost a proscenium theatre with great facilities and a large stage. The main aim of the space has been to host daily and they have achieved this with great success. Regular theatre is now part of the city’s consciousness.
Bengaluru, like Bombay, is a city divided by distance. People in the North find it hard to travel to the South for a play and vice versa. Therefore it is incredible that I was dragged to see two other up-and-coming spaces in the Garden City. What is more amazing is that they are small and in completely different parts of the city from each other, and RangaShankara.
Nani Arena has been in existence for a few years, but is about to remodeled into a “black box” studio theatre, to give performers in the city much required flexibility. Although the ceiling height is quite low, the space is capable of creating wonderfully intimate and unique performances.
The other space is truly a labour of love, built by two people who have dedicated their lives to theatre, Arundhati and Jagdish Raja. A builder approached them to “develop” the farm on which they lived; their agreement came with a clause — a theatre must be built on the plot as well. And so Jagriti was born. Although not yet fully complete, you can tell immediately that it has been created by people who know and love the theatre. The 202 seats form a semi-circle around the performer making the actor the centre of the room. The dressing rooms and technical box are large. And living accommodation for visiting artists, an outdoor performance area and a terrace rehearsal space are all part of the Jagriti complex. For the tiny space it occupies, it promises to be incredibly active.
With these three non-commercial spaces, Bengaluru is on the verge of becoming India’s first truly “locality- based” theatre city, with each area having its own cultural watering hole. Now all that is required is corporate support to activate these spaces in a big way — to boldly go where no city has gone before.