I don’t know about you but I have been feeling good about theatre in Hyderabad for quite a while. Yeah, sure we are yet to see some really top notch performances from local talent but we are surely headed there. The growth of this medium of entertainment can be gauged by the fact that in the last few years I have spent many an evening wondering whether to go for this play or that. Spoilt for choices is definitely a new phenomenon.

Some of the reasons for this surge in theatrical interest can be easily traced to festivals like the Hindu Metroplus Theatre Fest, the Qadir Ali Baig Theatre Performances and the mushrooming of informal groups like Dramanon, Sifar, Manch, Udaan, Nishumbita and what have you. Old, veteran warhorse Sutradhar for example, after years of struggling to find an identity and strike a common chord with mainstream is today a highly respected name in the circles of drama and Evam from Chennai has shown all the people concerned that theatre and poverty are not exactly entwined.

Yesterday however I saw two sides of a thespian coin and I am amazed at the event.

The first side was a brilliant one…at the Dramanon Press Conference to announce the SKITS Competitions, the inimitable RK Shenoy called for the first time ever…a member of the press to take part in an impromptu improv performance…and the applause was for the idea, the very concept as much as it was for the press man/ actor who did a wonderful job for a first time stage entrant.

The scene shifted a few hours later to Ravindra Bharati where the evening’s bill was a play with an interesting title…How to Skin a Giraffe…a Perch and Rafiki Production that brought together some of the finest from Bangalore and Chennai.

The previous evening we had witnessed a brilliant and touching show put up by the Koreans…in Korean with English subtitles…and I was looking forward to see how our Indian…especially South Indian friends would handle a multi dimensional and multi lingual play.

While they did not quite manage to be brilliant they were more than just good…and I enjoyed the casual language swings from English, Hindi and Nepali to Tamil and Kannada with a smattering of Telugu and I think Malayalam thrown in for good measure. The Hindi especially was a fair delivery and did not caricature the tongue.

But in spite of the multiplicity of languages and the varying pace of the performance that pendulumed from hectic to langurous…communication was complete and Popo and Pipi became the evening’s Heer Ranjha if not a Romeo Juliet.

The mix of languages however, especially with a seemingly Tamil skew disturbed some audience members and many walked out during the interval…but we still had a reasonably full house with audiences in the balcony above.

It was at the end of the near two hour long evening, just when the cast and crew were taking their curtain call that one Hyderabadi gentleman lost all sense of balance and decorum. He started ranting about the fact that he had not bargained for a ‘play in Tamil’ when he bought tickets for an ‘English’ Play.

While his comments may have been excused, the way he chose to address his concerns…first of all, disrupting a curtain call…second, being so completely out of sync with the rest of the appreciative audience…and quite ridiculously, addressing his objections to the Director of the play…wherein if he had cause to complain, it should have been to the Hindu for wrong or incomplete communication…these were not called for.

But then the Hyderabadi good sense kicked in and the audience enmasse, booed him and another gentleman with a similar grouse….and literally hounded the two out of the auditorium. A nasty situation was averted and an awkward moment for theatre avoided. And we all went back to our various cubby holes promising to slipper nutcases who refuse to look beyond self imposed horizons and cultural limitations introduced by sheer ignorance.

Thank you The Hindu…may your tribe increase…thank you Hyderabad…may your good sense always prevail.