After the curtains fall

“My first exposure to theatre happened due to one of my teachers (Mr. Alok Chatterjee) during graduation, who worked in it and was looking for actors to join him. Bhopal, my hometown, is culturally very rich which gave me the perfect platform to watch and participate in plays and develop an interest in them.

As a journalist for Hindustan Times, I had to cover a theatre festival which allowed me to watch Kavalam Narayana Panicker’s play for an entire week. It got me all the more curious about theatre performances- how a play is made and how it is perceived by the audience. Theatre happens to be one of the oldest forms of communication with very firm roots in our Indian culture. With changing times, our perception of theatre has changed tremendously. I was very intrigued to understand how the audience’s perception of theatre has influenced the kind of plays that are being produced at present. However my resources as a journalist were not enough to probe into the plethora of questions that were piling up inside me.

It was Sourabh Anant, the founder and director of Vihaan, one of the theatre groups I worked for who inspired me to perceive theatre as a communicator and I decided to pursue research to understand theatre and communication more systematically.

I got married during my MPhil and four months down the line, I had to go to Jharkhand to pursue a…