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A talented theatre troupe are all set for the stage after months of gruelling rehearsals as they prepare to perform in front of a packed audience.
A community theatre group called Khwabgaah, which translates as ‘House of Dreams,’ was founded by Anupam Ramesh Kinger last year as a way of expressing her deep love of the art.
Ram Rattan Hazir Ho, which roughly translates as ‘The Cry of the Courtroom,’ will be performed on Saturday at 7pm inside the kingdom’s prestigious Cultural Hall.
Anupam, who is both the writer and director of the play, said: “I hail from Delhi, and back in the late 1980s when I was at university, the city was a hub for Hindi theatre and we used to do lots of street plays where we took the Indian drums and went into the slums and start playing.
“When a crowd was gathered, we would do a small ad-lib performance related to an issue, whether it was sanitation, female health or whatever.
“In 1993 I got married and moved to Bahrain, and theatre took a backseat to teaching. However, writing is my first love, so I have a collection of Hindi poetry and now I’ve started writing plays.
“Through the years, I have found my mind filling up with a number of stories which, I realised, were fermenting, waiting to burst out into the sunshine! Khwabgaah was conceptualised out of this desire to share these stories with the world, so that we could all laugh, cry and contemplate together.”
Khwabgaah staged its first presentation, Main Noor Bano (My Name is Noor Bano) at the Bapco Club in Awali last year, entertaining a 450-strong audience.
Invigorated by the experience, Anupam has worked even harder to make her second play even better. Khwabgaah is now officially registered as a cultural entity with its own CR number, and has secured the premier venue for Ram Rattan Hazir Ho.
The production focuses on the trials and tribulations of a middle class family and how the current generation relates to the one before and the one after. “It’s something everyone can relate to,” Anupam said. “I always say it’s easy to make somebody laugh or cry, but it’s very difficult to awaken people who are already awake … and by that I mean I want to make people have realisations about things they take for granted, such as, family, love and separation.”
The actors and actresses are all friends of Anupam’s, and she is very grateful to them for ‘taking the plunge’ on her behalf. They are all Bahrain residents and members of the Indian diaspora.
They have been rehearsing for seven months, meeting weekly, whilst in the last month they have met daily to go over their lines and hone their craft ready for the big day.
In addition to acting, the play’s music was also written by Anupam and she has enlisted a friend to sing.
If all goes well, Anupam plans to continue to grow Khwabgaah and achieve her true goal of reinvigorating theatre, something she considers a ‘dying art form.’ She explained: “Khwabgaah rose out of the need for a space where people can unleash their creativity, and can collaborate together to polish their concepts, to execute the projects and showcase their stories for the whole world to see.
“I envision it becoming an umbrella under which people with various skill sets can come together and help each other present the best version of their creativity, be it theatre or poetry or prose or anything else that someone can think of.”
Tickets for Ram Rattan Hazir Ho are BD5 and are available by calling 36714859, 33375010 or 36922106. Any profits from the show will go towards a local charity.
