Walk into Clinical Trial No. 0001, and you're not merely taking your seat in the audience—you've unknowingly enrolled yourself in an experiment. The lights dim, three scientists welcome you into a study run by the fictional Centre for Human-Lice Collaboration, and before you realise it, you've become one of the subjects.
The play has been written and directed by Alia Sinha and supported by the Katkatha Puppet Arts Trust. “The world the play establishes invites the audience in as participants at a clinical trial,” notes Sinha. “Almost without your consent, you've been pulled into the study, and you're actually the people who are going to be observed.” What follows is a journey through head lice, genetic modification, bureaucracy, scientific authority, and humanity's relentless pursuit of self-improvement—told through a blend of shadow puppetry and live performance.
The story gradually takes the form of an in-world presentation for the participants of the clinical trial, filling them in on the sequence of events that led to the experiment. "It's a sort of flashback," Sinha says, "about how this trial came into existence and what brought everyone to this moment."
The unlikely protagonist
The most surprising ingredient in the production is head louse. The idea, Sinha says, had been living in her imagination long before the production found a stage. It finally took shape during the Puppetry Incubation Lab organised by Katkatha Puppet Arts Trust, an intensive programme designed to support emerging puppeteers in developing original work.
"What happens when head lice begin affecting the people they're infecting?" she says. “It was an extremely ridiculous premise, but everyone at the lab was incredibly supportive.”
Sinha, who works at a children's library, drew on her own experiences with head lice. “Getting head lice is a very common part of life when you work with children,” she says. “It's a very distressing experience. Most people remember having them as children, but unless you work with kids, you probably haven't thought about them recently. There's something incredibly visceral about that,” she says.
She remembers how contracting them pushed her into an uncomfortable mental space. “It's not really something you talk about socially. It's slightly taboo, slightly disgusting—or at least that's the perception. I felt there was something really interesting there to explore.”
The insects eventually became a metaphor for power itself. “I became interested in lice as a parasitic entity,” she says. “They're tiny, but they can hold an incredible amount of power over us. I started thinking about how power itself can be extractive—how it feeds on resources without giving anything back.”
Rather than presenting science as a neutral force, Clinical Trial No. 0001 adopts the language of institutional certainty. “The scientific framework is a core part of the show,” Sinha says. “You have this authoritative scientific voice saying completely unscientific things with immense conviction.”
Within the fictional research institute, scientists function as bureaucrats, while science fiction becomes a vehicle for examining larger questions about progress and humanity. But Sinha is careful not to reduce it to a cautionary tale about technology. “It offers a particular gaze through which audiences can look at these ideas, while also maintaining enough distance to reflect on them,” she says.
Despite its heavy themes, the play rarely takes itself too seriously, embracing humour and absurdity. “Even when you're dealing with serious issues, audiences don't have to sit through something grim or heavy,” Sinha says. “Playfulness adds layers, but it does so with warmth and generosity. It lets people engage with difficult ideas in a way that feels lively and embodied.”
The art of shadows
The production constantly shifts between live action and shadow puppetry with three scientists welcoming audiences into the experiment before slipping between multiple roles, voicing puppets and performing characters.
For Sinha, shadow puppetry offered possibilities that conventional theatre simply couldn't. “The funny thing is we're talking about technology that's supposedly beyond human comprehension. But in reality, we're just shining a light and moving paper in front of it,” she says. “Shadow puppetry asks audiences to actively suspend disbelief and conspire with the puppeteer to believe that these shadows are alive.”
Following its premiere at the Katkatha Puppet Fringe Festival earlier this year, the production now returns to Delhi. Sinha hopes audiences arrive with curiosity rather than expectations. "The show goes off on a completely unexpected tangent. I don't know if the questions people begin with will be anything like the questions they have when they leave."
Clinical Trial No. 0001 will be performed at The Bookshop Inc., Lodhi Colony, on July 31 (sold out), and at Lilanoor Centre for Voice and Music, South Ex II, on August 2 at 4 pm and 7 pm