Youth theatre competitions and festivals have had a rich and varied legacy as far as Indian Theatre is concerned. In Mumbai especially, they're celebrated with great regularity and with all the fanfare that the occasion demands. They're places of loud, buzzing excitement, youth charisma, cut throat competition and of a general bonhomie and joie de vivre. More importantly they're a milestone for journeys ahead.

Over the years or more precisely from 1999 onwards, one such significant milestone has been Thespo. The festival was launched by Theatre Group, Bombay and has since then been efficiently and passionately administered by Q Theatre Productions (QTP). It recently celebrated its tenth year as Thespo X from 4th to 14th December 2008. What was perhaps initiated as a small and local effort by a group of like-minded theatre people, friends and well-wishers, has graduated into a big event that auditioned fifty-five entries from as many as eight cities this year.

What is really nice about Thespo is that its core team members from QTP have been visionary and very committed about it. The festival does not simply exsist as one of the highlights in the annual, cultural calander of Mumbai but is now veritably a sincere movement in the direction of youth theatre. And unlike some other dated and frivolous inter-collegiate competitions, Thespo has not only become more demanding in terms of skill and talent but is also now a destination for professionalism in spite of its participants having to be under twenty-five years of age.

My own personal experience of Thespo dates back a few years. I can't claim of having been a close observer of the festival since its inception but I can say with enough confidence that the festival has truly matured ever since I have been watching it at least. Its tenth year has been a particularly good one. The festival itself has been taking stock of the decade that has flowered under its wings and this year's opening took place amidst a small but interesting exhibition on theatre photography. 'The Fourth Wall' featured the work of four photographers- Rafeeq Ellias, Madhu Gadkari, Meena Agarwal and Siddharth Siva.

Ellias' pictures of ballet performances in Russia were especially captivating while Madhu Gadkari's photo collection of TARANTULA TANZI (based on Claire Luckham's TRAFFORD TANZI), directed by Alyque Padamsee and with Karla Singh in the lead role, were illuminating of a moment in the history of the Mumbai stage. TARANTULA TANZI inaugrated the NCPA Experimental Theatre in 1984. So along with the artistic beauty that good photography commands, it also becomes in instances like these, a valuable resource of documentation of moments that are otherwise ephemereal by their very nature.

It has thus been Thespo's ability to engage with allied aspects of the theatre. In 2005 for instance it had a theatre poster design competition for young art directors. Its festival booklets apart from being informative make good reading, as this year's edition by Akarsh Khurana also did. Workshops, platform performances, film screenings, etc are an integral part of most theatre festivals and Thespo too encourages all these associated events whole-heartedly in preparation of the big experience of the play itself. This big experience at Thespo this year has only been intensified by the commendable show of the final, four plays that were selected.

The festival opened with DALAN, a Marathi play from Pune. Its 21-year old director, Nipun Dharmadhikari and lead actor Amey Wagh were not new to the Mumbai stage or to Prithvi Theatre where they were performing. They had had fun on it before with LOSE CONTROL and DALAN only seemed to solidify their reputation of whipping up more of the good humour on the basis of a script that couldn't have been simpler.

The play is based on DM Mirasdar's eponymous story but what makes it special in performance is Abhay Mahajan's dramatization, Rohit Nikam's lyrics and enjoyable performances from across the board of its actors. Incidentally both Abhay and Rohit are also amongst the ensemble of actors playing a group of schoolchildren. It's really a simple enough story of a village class teacher (Amey Wagh) whose attempts to seduce the mother (Deepti Bawiskar) of one his students, Shiva (Aalok Rajwade) land him in a funny enough situation. It's in this very simplicity of the play that Nipun is able to tease out endearing and laughter-filled moments with a bunch of some very talented young actors like himself. It's not often that individual actors stand out in an ensemble but in this case they do. And they do so very well.

Even its lyrics, which are played to live music on the stage are conversational in tone. There is also a whimsicality about them and it would be entirely in order to claim the play as a Musical. The set-design is as it should have been- appropriate and convenient and indeed the transition from one scene to the other is effortless and smooth. The play was an immediate hit with the audience and raised the bar for the plays to come.

Unusual is perhaps the best word to describe Rachana Reddy and Ishan Shukla's Hindi play BHADMANUS. It is seemingly built on a single narrative in which two judges are faced with the case of a dead body found in the woods but its heightened surrealism in terms of both script and performance make it a dense, multi-layered play. There are too many ideas, ranging from the philosophical to the psychological floating around here but none of them seem to endure, save for a line here or there.

Played out against a set design that is as strange (it has its appeal though) as the script, the play occupies a dark, sombre and a mysterious space where there is a blurring of lines between reality and illusion; between the conscious and the unconcious. The big ideas such as love, fidelity, art, truth and justice are being interrogated here but the overall result in spite of all the intellectualism does not strike a vivid note.

And yet I think it is a play that deserves attention given the virtual barrenness of original, contemporary Hindi Theatre that interests and challenges. Its director-actor Pratyush Singh has also done a reasonably good job of mounting the production. Performances are more or less fine and as the jury for Thespo well noted- Judge 1 (Vineet Kumar) commands a strong, stage presence. In fact his character could have been more interesting but that was not to be.

If Kashin Shetty would not risk carrying the vestiges of characters played in past plays, he would be a fine actor. He seems to take to the stage quite naturally with a quite sense of confidence. At the 2006 Thespo festival, he and his team then had a good showing with CONFESSIONS, which was based on Martin McDonagh's THE PILLOWMAN. This time around he acted in David Auburn's play PROOF (produced by Akvarious) and as it was with CONFESSIONS, has also directed it. This Thespo X entry was also very successful as it bagged awards for the best female actors, both in the lead and the supporting roles (Preetika Chawla played Catherine while Tahira Nath played Claire). Ali Fazal who plays a lanky, unassuming and an understated Hal also deserves a mention here.

PROOF on which apparently a film has also been made is a subtle, engaging and intelligent exploration of a father-daughter relationship, amongst others. It is good, intense drama played out in the intriguing field of mathematical genius but at its very heart, it's a play about the lives that we build around our loved ones and of the complex emotions emerging from thereon. In terms of direction too the production has been able to naturalize the more tricky scenes in which Kashin Shetty's father (Robert) interacts with his daughter-companion Catherine. The seamlesness between scenes has been nicely achieved.

But if there was one other production apart from DALAN that really rocked, it was Soumyak Kanti De Biswas' VIDEO from Kolkata. I must at once say that I was thoroughly impressed by this production- a moving feast of visuals in a collective landscape of big dreams and urban reality. Soumyak or Kanti as he is more popularly known, has written as well as directed this piece that departs from the more conventional definitions of a play.

In the words of this 23-year old writer-director himself, 'Beginning at the beginning, I must say that, more than anything else, VIDEO emerges from a collective will to present a sensibility. Hence it's just not the script or just the performance or even the lights and the sound that defines the play, it's all of them morphing together…it is a design, a craft to present a culture on a wooden stage.' The highpoint of the production in that sense is not only its innovative model but also its imaginative ability to use its production design as both a means and a metaphor.

A collage of different and yet integrated themes emerge from the still and moving images in the background and these coalesce with the immediacy of the performance in the foreground. Youthful aspirations, Mumbai dreams, student politics in Kolkata and the fundamentalism and terror that divide and kill people come together to present a slice of life that we recognize and have become altogether familiar and accustomed with. Performed in English, Hindi and Bangla, the production juxtaposes two protagonists- a student activist/magician from Kolkata and a frustrated young man whose celluloid dreams of Mumbai have come to nought.

But in spite of these two characters who seem to stand out, VIDEO is an ensemble piece driven by the moment in which it exists on screen and on stage or on both simultaneously. It is playful (its theatre references are quite delightful for instance), racy (it could be racier) and is definitely stylish. There are some moments that really stand out such as when a song in the genre of the Blues, immediately follows an outbreak of violence.

Even as the camera on-stage offers opportunities for creating parallel and visual sub-texts, the scenes with or without the paraphernalia resonate with the power of live drama. And this is no small achievement. In places it may appear as if the obvious about Mumbai is being repeated; so much so that it risks coming across as a cliché. But then even if it is does, the imaginative appeal of the production's concept and design has a far greater resonance. Indeed a pretty effective and sensational piece of original, contemporary theatre. It must be taken note of.

So congratulations Team Thespo for a stimulating showcase of plays this year. Looking forward to more of the good stuff in years to come.

*The writer is Editor of this site, a theatre critic and an academic keenly interested in Theatre & Performance Studies..