The ‘Ranga Shankara Theatre Fest ‘12’ — which will be held between October 27 and November 12 — is dedicated to the playwright William Shakespeare. The fest was unveiled at a press conference addressed by Girish Karnad, the chairperson of the Sanket Trust; Arundhati Nag, creative director of Ranga Shankara and Gayathri Krishna, the festival director.

This fest will be Ranga Shankara’s first international annual festival with productions from South Sudan, Kenya, Georgia and Bangladesh, apart from India. Plays will be in eight languages with English subtitles.

Gayathri Krishna says, “I got the idea of conducting this fest after I attended the ‘Globe to Globe Festival’ that happened in London. Though Shakespeare wrote all his plays in English, they have been translated to many other languages. In the ‘Ranga Shankara Theatre Fest ‘12’, we have invited six of the plays that were chosen for this
festival.”

A host of activities have been planned to promote theatre in the festival.
This includes a theatre and arts appreciation course.

Talking about the fest, Girish Karnad says, “I consider Shakespeare to be an Indian playwright rather than an English one. Shakespeare has been an important part of Indian theatre for hundreds of years. His plays have been translated to various Indian languages. So, this is a tribute that Ranga Shankara is paying to the greatest playwright ever.”

To encourage Kannada theatre, there will be performances in Kannada by Srinivasa Prabhu and Laxmi Chandrashekhar.

Actors from various troupes in Bangalore also join in to perform snippets from Shakespeare.

Apart from the regular plays, Ranga Shankara will also screen the movie Maqbool by Vishal Bharadwaj which is an adaptation of ‘Macbeth’. Tickets can be booked on indianstage.in and bookmyshow.com. For further information, log on to www.rangashankara.org