Coming up in Bengaluru: English adaptation of Karnad’s ‘Wedding Album’

City-based theatre group Courtyard Koota will stage an English adaptation of Girish Karnad’s ‘Wedding Album’ next week. The play is directed by Kishore Acharya and is one of Karnad’s last works.

Karnad makes a satirical social commentary on the absurdity of weddings here, something Kishore found interesting. “When you look at Karnad’s earlier works — ‘Nagamandala’, ‘Hayavadana’, and ‘Taledanda’ — he made a social commentary through historical or mythological narratives. But towards the last part of his writing career, he chose to make a rather direct commentary about the world around us,” he says.

‘Wedding Album’ is set in Dharwad in the late ’90s and early 2000s. It follows an upper middle-class family of a doctor, his wife, and their three children. The youngest daughter is about to marry a boy from the US. “It’s an arranged marriage, and caste plays a major role here. There are three boxes that the groom ticks — he is from the same caste, he has made it big in the US, and he lives in the US. The boy and girl have never met. They have spoken only over a few phone calls. That’s the absurdity that Karnad points to,” Kishore explains, adding, “These kinds of marriages are still rampant today.”

The cast includes Harish Seshadri, Reshma Nair, Srinidhi Achar, Chaitra Ballal, and Nikhil Bharadwaj, among others.

On July 9, 6.30 pm, at Bangalore International Centre, Domlur (entry free, RSVP at bangaloreinternationalcentre. org), and on July 30, 7.30 pm, at Ranga Shankara, J P Nagar (tickets online).