The Hindu : Front Page : Abhishek Majumdar wins the MetroPlus Playwright Award

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Tuesday, May 20, 2008
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Abhishek Majumdar wins the MetroPlus Playwright Award

Special Correspondent

The winning play explores issues of immigration and identity

Abhishek Majumdar

CHENNAI: Abhishek Majumdar is the winner of the MetroPlus Playwright Award 2008 for his entry Harlesden High Street. Instituted by The Hindu for the best original unpublished and unperformed English script, the Award carries a prize of Rs.1 lakh for the winning entry.

Harlesden High Street is the fifth play written by the 27-year-old Bangalore-based playwright, a Charles Wallace fellow and an alumnus of the London International School of Performing Arts. Eight plays were longlisted for the award, of which three were shortlisted earlier this month. The other two shortlisted entries were Poile Sengupta’s Samara’s Song and Vivek Narayan’s Mime X: Too Close To The Pixels.

Mr. Majumdar’s play on immigration and identity emerged as the winner from the 63 valid submissions received from all over the country for The MetroPlus Playwright Award. A panel comprising Ms. Arundhati Nag, prominent theatre personality and Founder/Artistic Director of Bangalore’s Rangashankara Theatre, Sabina Mehta Jaitley, Director of the New Delhi-based theatre group Yatrik and alumnus of the National School of Drama, and a representative of The Hindu judged the plays.

“Extremely intelligent”

In a citation, the panel described the play as “simple yet richly layered” and “extremely intelligent in the manner it manages the narration through very clever shifts of time, space and mood. Mr. Majumdar uses language with great economy and texture, and through a few characters, captures the circumscribed world of immigrants, their energy, their frustration, and their eternal dilemmas.”

About the inspiration for his play, Mr. Majumdar says that he lived close to and did all his shopping on Harlesden High Street when he was attending theatre school in London in 2006-2007. “What really appealed to me was that in the same shop, there would be people from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan working together, and working very hard. Often, they were people with very little education, very little understanding or politics or human rights, but with a very rich experience of life.” He adds: “My play is really about being in another land, being optimistic about life, and really trying.”

The Hindu will invite the award-winning play to be staged at the MetroPlus Theatre Festival in August this year.

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