Months after you’ve seen a play, the details begin to blur. Not all details, though. Some minutiae – an actor’s expression, a snatch of dialogue, a setpiece – leave a mark so strong, it is as if you saw the play yesterday.

A compendium of such inspired moments from plays I’ve watched in 2010.

• Ravi Credit: A couple visits Ravi’s shop, asks for something on credit. A quiet plea, a hesitant yes. All seems harmless and above board but before you know it the scene has snowballed into a synchronized scream. A flock of villagers whirl in and strip the shop bare to the refrain of "Ravi credit" as Ravi looks on, bewildered. [Miss Meena]

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Ratnan Prapancha is an attempt to portray the life of Kannada poet G.P.Rajaratnam (GPR) on stage by Kriyative Theatre. The lead actors, Laxmi Chandrashekar and Sundar, have been theatre artists for long and are household names in Karnataka because of their roles in several successful Kannada serials.

The first thing that caught my eye when I entered Ranga Shankara was the assortment of musical instruments on stage. I had read that songs would be part of the show and had imagined that it would be done in the usual way of playing songs in background. Seeing the instruments right there built a pleasant anticipation of a concert-cum-play. Having grown up listening to and singing GPR’s popular songs like Naayi Mari, Bannada tagadina tuttoori, Bhoomin tabbid mod iddange among others, I was glad to be a part of this musical tribute to the legendary poet.

Pancham Halebandi initiated the day’s proceedings by singing a popular G.P. Rajarathnam poem. He managed to wipe out my expectations of a fitting musical tribute by breaking up certain words and rushing through/repeating some lines/words. With all due respect to the “experimentation”, I still prefer Mysore Ananthswamy and Kalinga Rao versions of these verses.

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A play set in violence-ridden Kashmir, and you know what to expect. Or do you? Rizwaan is an unusually told story of a boy Rizwaan – literally, keeper of the Gates of Heaven – whose life and family are torn apart by insurgency in Kashmir. Rizwaan might be anybody in the news reports from the valley we read about in the papers every other day. When our lives are untouched by first-hand experiences of horror, we might take their narrations with a sub-conscious sense of detachment. Rizwaan, in a very quiet way, shakes you out of that detachment.

In the mould of Abhishek Majumdar’s earlier work Lucknow ’76, the narrative moves back and forth in time. We know at the outset how it will end and gradually fit in the jigsaw pieces. Smaller segments too don’t reveal themselves linearly. We are taken aback when a girl begins to chatter cheerfully of her father’s death by a bullet shot and it takes a while to understand why.

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Get informed about upcoming plays, theatre events, promotional offers and theatre-related news the easy way – follow these twitter accounts.

1. Evam @evam_entd

Twitter account of theatre group Evam. Apart from posting announcements about their plays, they also organize special contests for followers. The prizes in the past have ranged from free tickets to a role in their play.

[Evam once RT-ed a not-so-positive review of their play from DramaDose, which I was very impressed with. How often do we see such sporting acceptance of criticism?]

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Ranga Shankara holds an annual Theatre and Arts Appreciation Course this time of the year. The course includes, among other things, keynote addresses by eminent theatre & art personalities,  live demonstrations by artists, interactions about plays – all aimed to develop new ways of "seeing and listening" for lovers of theatre and art.

The course for 2010 starts on 22nd Oct 2010, spread over six days around two weekends.

Culture critic Sadanand Menon will spearhead the Theatre and Arts Appreciation Course 2010. The speakers this year include Girish Karnad, Bombay Jayashri (Carnatic Music), Leela Samson (Bharatanatyam), Anand Patwardhan (Documentary Films), Kavalam Narayana Panikkar, and N Pushpamala (Visual Art).

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“A break from Bollywood: make a song and dance about this brave Indian play” – that’s the title of the latest article [link] on the Guardian theatre blog, about Ram Ganesh Kamatham’s play Dancing On Glass.

I was initially thrilled to see something about an Indian play on the Guardian’s blog. By the end of it, I was rather disappointed.

The article makes statements like:

Bollywood is notorious for churning out vast quantities of films that take pride in being entertainment and nothing more. Young playwrights like Kamatham are stepping in to fill the void.

Ignore for a moment the sweeping generalization about Indian films, just consider: when writing of a play, why has the Guardian theatre blog chosen Bollywood as its yardstick for comparison? Apparently, the audience at New Delhi’s Habitat Centre were gasping at the profanity in this play because:

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I’ve always believed that stand up comedians need to be performers and actors themselves. They need to know their way around the stage. But there is also a reason why stand up comedy is stand up comedy and theater is theater. A reason why they are separate and are performed separately. And I would imagine that it is because stand up comedy doesn’t require all the assets of an actor, or of the stage for that matter, and so it is performed at a separate space where one just needs to see the performer.

So when Goblin production’s "Gentlemen" played out as a stand up comedy routine, one was left crying for the criminal waste of stage and good actors. I may as well have been at a restaurant watching the show, with a chicken wing in my right hand and a beer in the left.

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