The Madras Players to Present MADAIAH THE COBBLER this Month

Director Prasanna Ramaswamy says of the play:

"Displaced mountains, rivers and tribals as characters roaming in the urban space meet up with cobbler Madaiah who is an incarnation of Shiva himself. Together they take upon themselves the task of destroying the tyrannical and power mad king Samana, who after enslaving the Moon and Sun, is in the process of enslaving the Earth. Stunning in its contemporaneity of empowering the marginalised towards resisting the anti-people ruler, the text has fluid spaces for me to engage with a theatrical lingo. Over and above, as the denouement for most part is in the form of narration rather than dramatization, it threw a challenge to discover a telling which is also enactment, to build the tension by moving between evocation and dramatics. Through music, movement, colour and form the actors act out and tell the story."

The Playwright

H S Shivaprakash is a Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is the author of nine books of poems, 15 plays and three critical works in Kannada, which have been performed and translated into several Indian languages and English, French, Italian and German. His English books include I Keep Vigil of Rudra; Traditional India Theatre; Autumn Ways; Indian Theatre 2000; In Other Worlds: Poems 1976-2000; and Everyday Yogi. He has won several best book prizes from the Karnataka Literary Akademi. His areas of interest include theatre/literary history, Indian theatre, Medieval Studies, Comparative Literature, translation and folklore. His awards include Karnataka's Rajyotsava Award; the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award and the Sahitya Akademi Award. He has been the editor of Indian Literature; dean of the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, and director of The Tagore Centre, Berlin, Germany. He has travelled, lectured and read poetry in various countries in Europe, Asia and Americas.

The Director

Theatre Director, documentary filmmaker, Prasanna Ramaswamy is a recipient of Kalaimamani from the Tamil Nadu State and the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for her theatre work. She has also received LADLI Award (UNICEF) for gender sensitization and Sarathy & WISDOM Award. She has 22 stage productions to her credit and has created theatre plays in India, Pakistan and France in Tamil, English, Urdu and French. The main thrust of her theatre work has been on dislocation and renewal of life and her work is known for her original arrangement of text from varied sources like poetry, newspaper clippings, excerpts from classic texts, which are all arranged through interlinking texts that she herself writes. Her feature length documentaries on musician Sanjay Subrahmaniam, dancer Malavika Sarukkai and filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan have been screened in international festivals. Her film on folk dancers and shadow puppeteers, Sing Along Dance Across, premiered last month, and she has just completed a film on the celebrated writer Ashokamitran.

Cast and Crew

With a huge cast of 22, this play features the following actors and musicians:

Actors: Dileep Rangan, Priyanka Raghuraman, Nikhila Kesavan, Smrithi Parameswar, Parshathy J Nath, Niran Vikctor Benjhamin, V Sarvesh Sridhar, Shravan Ramakrishnan, Shankar Sundaram, Nikhil Kedia, Mekha Rajan, Vishwa Bharath, Shubh Mukherjee, Nishanth Narayan, Georgina A Mathew, Balaji K Moorthy, P C Ramakrishna, Sundar Subramanian, D Ramachandran, Geetha Lakshman

Musicians on Stage: Georgina A Mathew, Akshay Yesodharan, Vishwa Bharath, Abhinav Shankar

The Music, an original score, is by Georgina A Mathew, Anandh Kumar, Sandeep Narayan.

The costumes have been designed by Dinesh FT, and the props have been designed and fabricated by G Guru. Sets and Lights are by Victor Paulraj.

The Madras Players

Founded in 1955, The Madras Players is the oldest English theatre group in India. Having performed the works of playwrights from India and abroad, the group has about 300 productions to its credit. The group focuses on encouraging English plays on Indian themes. Please visit: www.themadrasplayers.org.

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