Staging their passion

Hyderabad’s thriving theatre culture just became happening with the addition of another talented theatre group, Safarnama. With their two-month stint of staging plays for the city audience, the group has come a long way from doing theatre just as a hobby at Infosys. According to the Safarnama team, it was their passion and love for acting which impelled them to venture into the theatre arena professionally.

“We are all IT professionals and members of the hobby club at Infosys where we had been staging plays since the last two years. But we felt that our audience was limited to our office colleagues, we wanted more. That’s the reason we formed Safarnama, and at present, we have 15 members who act, direct and do the pre-production work,” says Ashish Shrivastava. Elaborating about their journey and the challenges they face, Ashish says, “We are all full-time working professionals and after slogging at the office for long durations, we finish dinner quickly to focus on our rehearsals. For the two plays, DharmShastra and Atmadwand it took us about a month to finish the whole process — right from selecting the lead actors to designing the props for stage.”

On Sunday, the group presented both the plays at Lamakaan. Dharm-Shastra is an adaptation of a few verses from Rashmirathi by Ramdhari Singh ‘Dinkar’ while Atma-Dwand is an in-house production revolving around life-changing events of strangers who decide to sit together one night to share their stories.

One of the group members, Eipsa Aru says, “We select stories which are close to our heart and which we can relate to. We mainly prefer the writer and the director to be the same person as they will have a clear vision to get it across perfectly on stage.”

With this being the group’s second professional outing, Safarnama is geared up for much more. “We had started off in September with Shaam-e-Safarnama, a canvas of two short plays — Ek Aur Grahak and Bhartendu ka Bazaar, which received a lot of appreciation from the audiences. It is the appreciation from the audience which makes us work harder and present great plays,” says Shashank Srivastava.

Interestingly, Safarnama is open for creative collaborations with other theatre groups in the city. “Everyone is here to do great work and we don’t mind collaborating with others as well. At present, we are working towards making Safarnama a group to be reckoned with in the theatre circuit,” says Eipsa.