Four plays which have been winners of the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards, held annually in New Delhi, are coming to the NCPA as part of the first edition of The NCPA META Festival.
By Ornella D’Souza
In India, the film industry that owes its origins and constant inspiration to all forms of theatre—from the Natyashastra-structured natak to the crowdpuller nautanki—sees a plethora of swanky award ceremonies lauding the film fraternity throughout the year. Ironically, it’s not the same for theatre. Apart from a few state government awards—such as the Kalidas Samman (Madhya Pradesh), Nataka Kalasarathy and Kalaimamani (Tamil Nadu), Nandi Natakotsavam Awards (Andhra Pradesh)—India has only two national-level theatre awards that have been organised consistently. The Sangeet Natak Akademi Award by the Indian government has been conferred on practitioners of theatre and its allied arts (acting, costumes, script, lighting, etc.) every year since 1952. The Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards (META), set to celebrate its 20th anniversary with the next edition in March 2025, annually felicitates thespians in 13 categories and a Lifetime Achievement award.
This December, META, with a stronghold in Delhi until now, is coming to the shores of Mumbai for the first time. The NCPA, in association with Bajaj Beyond, is bringing a quartet of plays in a festival at the Experimental Theatre this month. Each of these plays took home a bevy of awards at their respective META editions.
Thespian Joy Maisnam adapts noted poet Dharamvir Bharati’s Hindi play Andha Yug, which begins on the 18th day of the Mahabharata war, into a ‘psycho-physical’ drama, blending folk music, dance, martial arts, acting and very little dialogue. It not only bagged the prestigious award for Best Play at META 2019 but won three more for stage design, costume and innovative sound. At the same edition, Samagam Rangmandal’s Agarbatti, in Hindi and Bundeli, earned Swati Dubey the award for Best Director. The play— based on the massacre committed by Phoolan Devi and her gang to avenge her rape by upper-caste men in the Behmai village of Uttar Pradesh—also won awards for Best Light Design, Best Actor (Female) and Best Original Script. Raghunath—written and directed by Bidyut Kr. Nath, and noted for picking up six awards including Best Production, Director, Original Script and Lead Actor (Male)—is a heartbreaking tale of a bereaved father’s determination to not have another death in his village in Assam in the face of devastating floods. He tries to fool the government into believing he has a religious relic for which a bridge needs to be built in the village. The monologue Do You Know This Song?, directed and performed by Mallika Taneja, which earned awards for Best Lead Actor (Female), Best Sound and Music Direction, rakes memories of one’s childhood and lost dreams. Bruce Guthrie, Head of Theatre & Films at the NCPA, says, “It’s a nice, balanced selection. From Andha Yug, a positive reflection on the Mahabharata war, to Agarbatti, on resilience and liberation, to Raghunath, a poignant tale of loss and hope, and lastly Do You Know This Song?, a moving musical of sorts, about love and memory.”
The allure and relevance
META follows one of theatre’s cardinal rules—to show a mirror to society. Voices of the common man and the marginalised, plays in regional Indian languages and scripts by writers from the hinterland that bring forth situations of injustice, oppression, abuse, mental health, poverty, casteism and class wars, all find their due place at this celebration of excellence in stagecraft. “Theatre is supposed to reflect reality, whether you like it or not. [This is] just what plays by Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde, Badal Sircar or Mahesh Dattani do. They make you think.” And this is not something that finds support with ease. “There are those odd occasions when hoodlums, and not necessarily the state, have threatened local productions. But META’s responsibility is to the larger issue, the freedom of expression. That’s what theatre is about, right?” observes Sanjoy K. Roy, Managing Director of Teamwork Arts.
Established in 2005 by the corporate giant Mahindra Group and the production company Teamwork Arts, META is viewed in the same league as the annual Bharat Rang Mahotsav (BRM) by the National School of Drama (NSD)—touted as Asia’s largest theatre festival since 1999—which stages plays simultaneously in 15 cities across India. META, in comparison, is fiercely competitive. Its annual open call alone receives close to 400 entries, out of which the META Secretariat (its internal selection committee) shortlists only 10 plays. These are then staged at Delhi’s prominent theatre halls, Kamani Auditorium and Shri Ram Centre for Performing Arts, to ticketed audiences and a jury comprising theatre stalwarts. The 2024 jury, for instance, included theatre actor, casting director and writer Dolly Thakore; actor Kulbhushan Kharbanda; playwright and writer Mahesh Dattani; actor, music composer, singer and set designer Raghubir Yadav; director of the Serendipity Arts Foundation and Serendipity Arts Festival Smriti Rajgarhia and theatre and film actor Vinay Pathak.
Each edition ends with a glamorous red-carpet awards night that announces winners across 13 categories and a Lifetime Achievement Award. The 2024 Lifetime Achievement Awardee was actor, director, and former director of NSD, Ram Gopal Bajaj, while previous recipients include noted thespians Badal Sircar, Zohra Sehgal, Ebrahim Alkazi, Girish Karnad, Barry John and Sushma Seth.
The beginnings
Roy says that Teamwork Arts devised the format of META in the early 2000s because “we felt if film was being celebrated in a big way, then why not theatre? Most film actors and directors emerge from theatre.” He, together with Ravi Dubey (the late entrepreneur and creative head of META), pitched the idea to Anand Mahindra, “who was keen to support the genre of theatre.” One of their manifesto pointers was to consciously promote plays in diverse regional languages, not only in English and Hindi. “In the early days of META, we had to convince audiences to attend plays in Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi or Gujarati. Some plays had just 10 to 12 people attending,” recalls Roy. “Today, every META play is sold out.”
Another decision that created a butterfly effect in Indian theatre was the emphasis on originality, especially in writing. “Initially, Indian theatre didn’t have the kind of original writing we see today. Many of the scripts were adaptations of classics. We introduced an award for Best Original Play, which in the pecking order of the META categories offers the second highest prize money. Now, there’s prolific, new writing coming in from both metro cities and rural/semi-rural towns near Jabalpur, Cuttack, Kozhikode, Imphal, for instance, which have witnessed turmoil. This evolution has been the most exciting thing to witness in 20 years of META,” Roy observes.
NCPA innings
Scheduled for the penultimate week of 2024, META’s Mumbai edition is set to be a happy addition to the NCPA’s annual theatre calendar, already plump with over 250 plays scheduled every year. Its theatre vertical gives enough focus to regional language plays by hosting its own annual Marathi theatre festival Pratibimb for which it also commissions plays. There is also a Gujarati theatre festival on the horizon. The NCPA also creates and produces its own plays; its recent production The Gentlemen’s Club in collaboration with Mumbai-based Patchworks Ensemble toured London, staging shows at the Soho Theatre. Along with films and documentaries, the NCPA screens theatre productions from the National Theatre, UK, as well. With META heading to Mumbai, Guthrie is elated, as the project was placed on hold during Covid and finally picked up after he was invited as the jury member for META’s 2023 edition. “When it comes to theatre, the UK has Olivier Awards, the US has Tony Awards and India has META. It is fantastic that META will kick-start its 20th year celebrations at the NCPA. They [META] should be proud of what they have achieved because to stay consistent for this length of time is quite astonishing. [They have created] a great opportunity for theatre groups across India to showcase their work in Delhi and connect with the larger theatrical community,” says Guthrie.
In addition to taking META winners to the NCPA, the celebrations for the milestone include “reviving the award amount and making the awards night glitzier,” Roy informs us. “The best of theatre in Delhi is going to find another space, which is Mumbai, where most theatre productions end up in search of greener pastures. And what better place for META to have its season than at the iconic NCPA, which is already representative of the multi-genre, multilanguage space?” Every city has a different sensibility, and Mumbai being the stronghold of Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati theatre, will have interesting audience reactions, feels Roy. “But as we did in Delhi we need to ‘grow’ an audience that’s open to diverse experiences. We have curated those META-winning plays that we think best represent different parts of India to give audiences that variety at the very first META festival at the NCPA,” says Roy. Guthrie concurs. These productions were created outside Maharashtra “so Mumbai audiences get to celebrate other cultures.”
There were other practical criteria too. For instance, the plays are still ‘active’ shows, so the actors are available. Their set designs also fit into the 267-seater Experimental Theatre. “Otherwise we’d need the 1,000-seater Jamshed Bhabha Theatre, and selling those many seats for a non-local language play is quite hard to do,” admits Guthrie. For the benefit of the audience, subtitles in English will run on digital screens at the stage corners, which “can be distracting, but a useful crutch,” says Guthrie.
META is mindful of the fact that theatre is one of the less commercially profitable arts, and applicants may be struggling to run their productions. The bunch of instructions under ‘Important Information’ on its website, thus, are heart-warming. Like expenses for shipping the set, or travel by AC II and III Tier Sleeper, lodging, venue cost, technical requirement and even video recording the play, if requested, would be borne by the Festival Secretariat. For the December event, however, the NCPA will split this responsibility, making it more than just the venue partner for META’s Mumbai ambitions. Guthrie says, “We (the NCPA) are producing the festival, supported by Bajaj Beyond, which Teamwork Arts will facilitate, though it’s a Mahindra property. We have jointly coordinated the logistics for the travel and accommodation of the theatre companies, and will pre-rig the set-ups and dress rehearsals. These are award-winning artistes with award-winning shows, and we want them to experience a degree of comfort and will ensure they are well looked after.”
This article was originally published in the December 2024 issue of ON Stage.
