Theatre

A cattle farmer who aspires to be a stage actor, Das works with a cosmopolitan theatre troupe headed by an ill-tempered, foul-mouthed director. When the director’s tantrums unearth buried resentments among the group’s members, the play they are rehearsing threatens to come apart. 

Actors are cattle, Alfred Hitchcock once remarked. The young and athletic Das surely feels the weight of this notorious maxim on some level. After all, he tends to his cows every morning before heading into the city to work with an eclectic theatre troupe. Here, he and his actor colleagues are given the livestock treatment by their ill-tempered, foul-mouthed director Bhoominathan. As his intense and  toxic outbursts begin to strain relationships between the group, Bhoominathan’s play may fall apart.  

Nishanth Kalidindi’s charming Theatre offers an impressionistic, lighthearted look at the internal dynamics of a cosmopolitan theatre group, comprising real-life stage practitioners living in the previously French outpost of Pondicherry in Southern India. 

Developed in tipsy, nervous and often fuzzy images, Kalidindi’s film derives its energy from a constant clash of tones, landscapes, languages and moods. Theatrical elements, such as the actors’ intimate bodily presence and their overlapping live voices, collide with a pointedly cinematic tendency to cut in and out of long-running conversations to which the viewer feels like a privileged outsider. With its appealingly light, mosaic-like approach to narrative, Theatre furnishes a happy-go-lucky work that isn’t afraid to get lost. 

– Srikanth Srinivasan

Trailer

• 

• 

• 

•