META enters tenth year, shortlists ten plays

The Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards and Festival (META) announced 10 shortlisted plays for showcasing them on its platform and for selecting from among them the top performers in various categories. Presently in its 10th year, META also announced its jury for selection of the top performers in 13 categories like best direction, best actor and actress, best costume, etc.

Sanjoy Roy, managing director of Teamwork Arts, which organises the festival every year with Mahindra, said this year they received over 290 entries from across the country, out of which 10 were shortlisted.

“This is the first time we are sharing the process of selecting final performances from the entries we get. A selection committee of five people is formed before the nominations and it filters the entries for over a week to select the 10 best,” Roy said.

The selection committee, this time comprised of noted theatre artists Vinod Nagpal, Sudhir Tandon, Sajitha Mathadil, Anoop Hazarika and Deepa Punjani, bringing together three different generations in performing art.

The 10 entries finalised for the six-day festival are testimony of the diverse participation the event has seen from across the country with plays in Assamese, Manipuri, Marathi, Kannada, Malayalam, Hindi and English language.

Alam Allana, who is part of the jury, said META has helped in breaking the barrier of language and according visibility to those performances which are not in the languages we know.

“So many groups are coming from the Northeast. We have broken the barriers of language. Like the supertitles we have at the NSD festival, we can enjoy so many more plays. We don’t only want to see Hindi plays or plays in the language that we can speak. We want to see plays from all over the country, so we are using technology in a very useful way,” says Allana who was the chairperson of NSD from 2005-2013.

Most of the plays nominated are not adaptations of classics, but are rather original scripts which theatre groups have written on issues affecting them. “Who are these writers? They are not Girish Karnad, they are not Vijay Tendulkar. These scripts have been written by these kids, they have felt passionate about a theme and have written about that. All the plays that we are going to see will be very topical,” adds Allana.
As a part of the 10th anniversary celebrations of META, the organisers launched Curtain Call: Celebrating Indian Theatre, a book exploring the changing landscapes of the Indian Theatre scene in past decade.

Theatre personalities pointed out that theatre traditionally has been suffering from fatal money crunch, which has proved to be a major impediment in its growth, but with the help of corporate houses like Mahindra, festivals like META are able to provide a platform of expression and recognition to artists from remote corners of the country. “It is very heartening to see now new players in theatre. When I see snippets of these plays I don’t know anybody - actors, writers or directors. And this is support for future generations, META is supporting the future, supporting the unknown people, people who are not visible,” Allana told PTI.