The people behind Indian theatre, kept discoverable after the curtain falls.
Indian theatre has no shared, verified record of the people who make it: the playwrights, directors and actors, their plays, productions, and the collaborators around them. The Stagebook is that record: story-led profiles, carefully sourced, that separate what someone wrote, directed and performed.
It grows one profile at a time. Each is independent and open to correction by the artist and their company.
From the first pages of aRANYA to the solo intimacy of Traasadi. A life in words, a world on stage.
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From Yayati to Rakshasa Tangadi: nearly six decades of turning myth, history and folk tale toward the present.
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From the songs of Agra Bazar to the truthful thief of Charandas Chor, a new Indian theatre built with the nacha performers of Chhattisgarh.
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From Uday Shankar’s dance company to Prithvi Theatres, and back on stage with her sister decades later.
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From a terrace theatre in Bombay to the battlements of Purana Qila: the productions he staged and the school he built.
Read the profile →New profiles are added regularly. Naseeruddin Shah, Irrfan Khan and more are on the way.
The logo is a keepsake playbill ticket: the name as an admission, a memento of an evening at the theatre.
In Indian theatre the teen ghanti, the third bell, means the play begins. Not a mask, a summons.
So the bell hides in the round O of “OF”, the one letter that stays when the rest takes a bow.
Come after the third bell.
The play has already begun.