Bound by love, but set apart by time

Tahatto theatre’s latest play, Love in the Cholera of Time — written and directed by Prashanth Kumar Nair, will be staged in the city. The 90-minute play is said to be a “sci-fi romantic drama based on Einsteinian laws of time, Shakespearean whimsies of love.”

Tahatto theatre’s latest play, Love in the Cholera of Time — written and directed by Prashanth Kumar Nair, will be staged in the city. The 90-minute play is said to be a “sci-fi romantic drama based on Einsteinian laws of time, Shakespearean whimsies of love.”

“Tahatto was started accidentally 14 years ago by myself and a group of five friends, who had met at a theatre workshop and decided to do something on stage. But, none of us had any clue what theatre meant or what its logistics were. We just decided to stage one play and then be off on our way. So we met theatre actors, writers, directors, who were willing to come on board and help us set sail,” says Prashanth.

The first play they staged was Funny Thing Called Life, which was followed by Romeo and Juliet, No Strings Attached and many more. Romeo and ... was selected for The Hindu Metoplus Theatre festival.

“This was a flip-sided take at the original Shakespeare play, about what the theme means to a playwright who lives in the times that I do,” shares Prashanth, who won the Hindu MetroPlus PlaywrightAward in 2012 and won a cash prize “which was enough for us to pull off another production and the journey went on.”

Coming back to his latest production, Love in the Cholera of Time, Prashanth says, “I started writing this bang in the middle of the pandemic. Time felt vaguely fast and yet crawled at the same time. I wrote one scene and realised it was developing into a love story spanning decades.

“The core concept is time and the non-linear experience of it. A lot of my own life experiences and industrialised weaponisation of time, which is seen as to how much we get done in time matters come in here. I was working from home and had to keep up the same level of productivity, which was just not possible.

“Yet, we were under pressure to keep the capitalist machinery on. There seems to be a commodification of time, and during the pandemic it made me wonder what exactly time meant. And that is what inspired the theme of our latest play.”