A new place to play

CHENNAI: The stage is now set… online. And the drama of theatre productions is as close at hand as your mobile phone, and only as far out of reach as your TV remote. With a handful of movie directors, actors and avid theatre-goers taking their cue from the growing world of digitisation, stage productions from around the world are now available on online platforms, giving new-gen patrons a novel way of watching their favourite plays.
At Mumbai-based Cineplay, co-founded by Subodh Maskara and Manu Dhawan, plays are chosen from around the world and recreated in a cinematic format to provide a "digitally-immersive experience", now showing on digital platform Hotstar.
The company has roped in playwrights, actors and theatre directors such as Mahesh Dattani, Nandita Das and Lillete Dubey as well as movie directors like Nagesh Kukonoor and Santosh Sivan to create, as Dhawan puts it, "a unique format that marries theatre and cinema." Dhawan says they draw from scripts they feel will work well for an Indian audience — productions have been as varied as Dattani’s ‘Dance Like a Man’ to Boicheck, an adaptation of German play ‘Wozyeck’. "Any great theatre production comes and goes, and if you have missed it, too bad. This way it’s timeless and audiences here are exposed to plays from across the world," says Dhawan.
Directors like Sivan, who directed Boicheck, say the idea draws them in because it is innovative and challenging. "I have to make my kind of cinema within the limitations of a play setting. For me, it was an interesting segue between my movie shoots – getting to work with stage professionals, the challenge of the cinematography and direction, the theme, and the speed at which I worked. We shot the play in five days," says Sivan.
While at Cineplay, creating a finished product takes anywhere from three to six months, other online platforms have a faster, more ‘live’ version of productions up and running. Chennai-based Creative Organisation for Dramatic Arts (CODA) puts up short-format plays on the YUV app of Kavi Puvi Viamedia, a digital media company with video content that has a south India focus. CODA, which kicked off this May, holds multi-director multi-play evenings once a month, which are then put online. "I’ve been part of various theatre groups in Chennai for the last 18 years and there is a limited audience for plays here.
The idea behind going online is to get greater visibility for short form theatre and for talent from the south," says Denver Anthony Nicolas, who curates CODA along with Vinithra Madhavan Menon. CODA is collaborating with theatre groups from Chennai, Coimbatore, Madurai, and other TN cities and is planning to rope in groups from Karnataka and Kerala as well, says Menon.
In Delhi, weekends for Harkirat Sandhu are incredibly busy, coordinating the shoots of several plays that take place at different venues. The weeks are just as hectic, editing the play recordings so they are ready for their subscription-based viewers as soon as possible. "We cover 70% of the plays that take place every weekend," says Sandhu, who founded his start-up Playmyplay in 2016, after he couldn’t make it for one of his friend’s plays because he got stuck at work. "That’s when it hit me — what if there was a way to archive the theatre performance and offer it online so people can watch it at leisure," adds Sandhu, whose site has around 3,000 subscribers paying Rs 399 a year. "Half the subscription amount goes back to the theatre. I want theatre to have a wider reach.
The more people watch these plays, the more popular the groups will get. It’s a way to keep the profession and the passion for the arts alive," says Sandhu, who shoots the plays at his own cost. "During the editing we add the close-ups and long shots to make it more exciting for the screen," says Sandhu, who now has 300 plays up both on his site and as a channel on Jio TV, and believes that though theatre is always better live, online is the future, "especially since even Broadway has got into the act."
Actor and founder of group Stray Factory, Mathivanan Rajendran, who has participated in CODA evenings, thinks it’s early days for theatre online. "Now it feels like a play just being shot on camera. But I can see that a new language is slowly beginning to form. Also, plays are often tailormade to the spaces in which they are performed and the audience likely to attend them. If my play goes online, I need to now make it for a viewer possibly on a commute or sitting at his office desk," says Rajendran.
"It’s an exciting format but also daunting. Online videos give plays a larger audience and that can have repercussions when we deal with sensitive issues," says Rajendran. So, opinions on GST will perhaps no longer make the cut.