Bengaluru Theatre Festival makes its debut this weekend

Lillete Dubey talks about being part of the Bengaluru Theatre Festival’s opening shows

Theatre lovers in the city can rejoice and free up their social calendar — the Bengaluru Theatre Festival has its opening night this weekend with an enviable ensemble cast that includes the likes of Naseeruddin Shah, Ratna Patak, Lillete Dubey, Pankaj Kapur and others.

The Bengaluru Theatre Festival (BTH) comes to the city courtesy of Alchemist LIVE, the same name behind the Delhi Theatre Festival. According to Prabhu Tony, COO and co-founder of Alchemist LIVE, Bengaluru seemed to be an obvious choice when it came to augmenting the festival’s reach.

“We’ve been running the Delhi Theatre Festival for five seasons now and we wanted to expand the footprint of the festival and take it to other cities. Not only was Bangalore one of the names which kept coming up over the last few years, but we also received a lot of queries from the people of the city requesting a similar festival there.”

“I think Bangalore was a natural choice. And when we spoke to the artistes and others about it, we got a resounding “Yes!” so we’re here now,” says Prabhu.

For their debut, BTH will be staging Dopehri by Pankaj Kapur, Old World by Naseeruddin Shah and Ratna Pathak Shah, and Salaam Noni Appa by Lillete Dubey, Yateen Karyekar, Jayati Bhatia, Rishi Khurana, and Gillian Pinto. About the curation of this lineup, Tony says, “These artistes have been associated with us at the Delhi Theatre Festival (DTH) for a while now, and they were all quite excited about being a part of the BTH opening as well.”

“Old World by Naseer saab is premiering in Bangalore, while Salaam Noni Appa featuring Lillete Dubey is a bestseller written by Twinkle Khanna. Dopehri is based on a novella written by Pankaj Kapur himself. All our selections are unique in their own way — while Old World has a sage and energetic vibe, and Dopehri is a unique one-man show, Salaam Noni Appa has full-fledged action unfolding on stage.”

Prabhu says they wish to bring “all the vibrance and vivaciousness as well as a sense of community” associated with a music fest to the theatre scene with their events. “At this year’s edition of DTH, we had close to 15,000 people at the theatre across four venues, three days and across 12-13 shows. Now, that is something that we are bringing to Bangalore, in the hope that we can introduce more people to this art form.”