BENGALURU: Characters without makeup, performance sans stage, and a space without lighting... these are new encounters that the theatre artistes are trying to grapple with. “We are so used to a stage and movements – all of which are not a choice now,” says Shatarupa Bhattacharyya, the director of Six Dead Queens and an Inflatable Henry, which saw its digital premier on Sunday.
The play is presented by Bangalore Little Theatre, one of the city’s oldest English theatre groups. When she acquired the rights of the play, written by a group of women in the United Kingdom, Bhattacharyya had assumed that through this year – which also marks the 60th year of the group, the work would be performed on several stages. But with the sudden turn of events, Bhattacharyya decided to take her all-women play online for the sake of theatre lovers.
“While the premier in the second half of last year was a full-fledged production, we decided to move with the times, and go ahead with a rehearsed reading,” says Bhattacharyya, whose play is available on the BLT YouTube channel for the next 15 days. The play revolves around the six queens of Henry-VIII. While the king himself never appears, the sort of partner he is comes through the six women, who bring out various aspects of his personality. “The comedy and dance musical brings out issues pertaining to the ideas of women empowerment and feminism, as well as the personality of a king who is not able to settle for one woman,” she says.
So, while movements are minimal in this performance, with it being limited to facial expressions, the idea is to give viewers an essence of the story. “It’s also about entertaining the audience through a story that has a great deal of history, which can be fun,” she says. Every day between 7.30pm and 9.30pm, the cast has been ‘meeting’ online, during which the actors have been getting used to their new normal. “With the dependency on technology, there comes into play other factors, including volume and network, which are major challenges. Then there’s the issue of lights and ensuring that everyone has the same kind of lights takes time. So, all of these external factors can be very frustrating,” she admits.