Monika Monalisa By Express News Service BENGALURU: When Vamsi Matta, director of Bhojpuri play Lysistrata, staged the play at The Courtyard Cafe over the weekend, he didn’t expect to have it houseful. This, owing to the fact that the play was going to be catering to a select audience – those who know Bhojpuri. In a cosmopolitan city like Bengaluru, plays in regional languages are steadily gaining prominence, with Bengali, Kashmiri, Tamil, Malayalam dramas becoming a weekly phenomenon. “Bengaluru has always been a multi- cultural city with a large number of theatre lovers. So I decided to go ahead with this piece of work because I felt we are at a time when we would get an audience whether or not they speak the language,” says Matta, who was sceptical whether he would get actors to play the part and enunciate the dialogues correctly. “Much to my surprise that was not difficult either,” he says about his play – a Bhojpuri adaptation of the Greek classic by the same name – which will be staged again on March 22, at Ranga Shankara. While many might feel that plays in regional languages have only a niche audience, theatres artistes point to the changing trend. Tanmoy Dutta, who has directed three Bengali plays so far, with his latest being Taskar Brittanto, says, “While Bengali plays have not reached the popularity of Kannada and English ones, I still find the crowd to be slowly expanding. The number of audience members I got for my last play in 2020, was definitely double the number I got for the one in 2018,” Dutta says about his recent work which is a humorous tale of mistaken identities, when a burglar enters a rich man’s flat assuming it is empty only to find to his utter surprise that the house owner, an influential and politically powerful person, is having an extramarital affair. Dutta goes on to add, “If an English play has 8-10 shows, my plays will have about 4-5. Most of the publicity for the show is done through word of mouth. But of course, there is a curiosity.” While excitement among artistes and audience about other regional languages coming to the fore, performance spaces are unsure if it is a viable option when it comes to sale of tickets. Gayathri Krishna, who works closely with Ranga Shankara, says it indeed difficult to get a large enough audience. “At Ranga Shankara we have staged plays in more 36 different languages. There are some adventurous theatre-goers who don’t mind coming for new kinds of plays,” says Krishna, adding they also make use of technology for the use of subtitles, wherever required.

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