Creating a sense for drama and the act goes on

Think theatre and the first name that comes to mind is Vikash Khurana. Stagecraft, the theatre company found by him in 2003 has been consistently feeding city’s craving for good quality plays.
Khurana studied theatre under the tutelage of Satyadev Dubey in Mumbai. “But when I returned to Nagpur in the nineties there was a vacuum,” he says.

“A few of my friends then began to get together and we rehearsed some scripts and would perform strictly before friends and relatives. And as many of my friends were either Parsees or Christians the plays were mostly in English and were performed at the auditorium of Tata Parsee School,” he adds.

As the word got around and audience came in, Khurana and his theatre group began to charge a nominal amount of Rs10 as ticket fee. “That was the time when we began to look at theatre a bit more seriously. Some of the plays produced by us were in demand by schools who wanted to stage them as fund raisers,” says Khurana.

Around the year 2003, Khurana felt the need to formalize his working structure and stagecraft was formed. Today the 15-year-old theatre group has staged 75 plays in the city and have travelled with many of their productions.

“Way back when we began with Stagecraft, the scene was dismal. Finding actors was difficult and parents were weary of sending their daughters for rehearsals which usually took place in the evenings,” says the actor and director of many plays.

“But as the audience grew aspiring actors and directors expressed a desire to join us. That was the time I began taking theatre workshops as many parents felt that doing theatre would help in enhancing the personality of their ward and give them the required confidence,” says Khurana who can rightfully claim credit for training more than 350 boys and girls as actors, writers and directors.

Though Stagecraft was initially known for the English plays but lately quite a few in Hindi too have been coming from the group. “If you ask me theatre has no language and in this city of which Mahesh Elkunchwar is a resident, Marathi theatre is very evolved. In fact, the first Hindi play done by us was an adaptation of Elkunchwar’s Pratibimb. He gave me the Hindi translation done by Vasant Deo and in 1999 we for the first time organized five-day theatre festival in Nagpur where five plays in three languages were staged. That kind of set the tone,” Khurana adds.

With so much behind him, Khurana says he would now like to set new targets. “The thinking caps are on. Our Adda has been a success and we have been staging plays very consistently. Now we need to do something different, maybe present ourselves in a new avatar,” says city’s theatre guru.