The six awardees Mangesh Ingole, Shweta Mishra, Bharathi A, Aakash Kumar, Meghna Roy Choudhury and Janhavi Pawar - all theatre practitioners recently supported by Inlaks with the Theatre Award and the Drama School Mumbai Theatre Studentship - spent the last year honing their craft and expanding their idea of what theatre could be and do. The showcase reflected their journey, passion and unique perspectives beautifully.

Read on for a peek into their wonderful performances and presentations.

For highlights of the performances click here

Past Theatre Awardees Rency Philip and Sharanya Prakash not only anchored the showcase, but also spent the last month guiding and supporting the awardees as they shaped their performances and expressions, with many of them doing a solo for the first time.

Mangesh Ingole

Mangesh's piece told the story of an actor who recently graduated from an acting school and is looking for acting opportunities in the industry. Before joining the school, he had only acted in plays, and his experience was limited to theatre. The new world that has unfolded before him is nothing short of a shock. He showcased bizarre casting calls with the most absurd requirements, which were striking in their lack of sensitivity.

Shweta Mishra

Shweta presented ‘Princess Tile’, a poignant solo performance that began wrapped in nostalgia. The narrator recalled her childhood with her best friend, Hilda - their river rituals, sandwiches by the water, and the secret washroom kingdom guarded by a ‘princess tile’. But the laughter slowly thins. What once felt magical becomes the place where both girls hid from the silent ache of childhood sexual abuse. As they grow older, their lives pull in different directions. Hilda becomes a bold, questioning voice resisting authority, while the narrator becomes a laundress - a role Hilda once encouraged, believing that washing is its own language of survival, where stains hold stories and cleansing becomes a form of healing. And then, life shifts unexpectedly. One day, Hilda is simply nowhere - gone from routines, from streets, from memory’s reach. Days fold into each other… until, one quiet day, someone knocks on her door. Princess Tile is Shweta’s newest and most personal crossing—an exploration where memory, movement, and storytelling gather into one living pulse on stage.

Bharathi A.

Bharathi presented a short scene from a play she wrote and directed. The scene revolved around King Sisubala and his wife Bagavathani. It portrayed a moment where Bagavathani advises her husband not to attend the royal sacrifice hosted by his brother Dharma in Indraprastha, warning him that his adversary Krishna will be present—an encounter that could lead to tragedy. This scene, adapted from a traditional Kattaikkuttu play, was reinterpreted with contemporary dialogues to reflect the challenges faced by women performers today—both as artists and as women navigating societal norms.

Aakash Kumar

Aakash presented a piece based on Vijaydan Detha’s story ‘Aadamkhor’ (The Man-Eater), which dissolved the boundaries between humans and animals. The word ‘Aadamkhor’ literally means ‘one who eats humans’, but this story is not about a literal cannibal. Instead, it spoke of those humans who, driven by greed, deceit, envy, hypocrisy, and cruelty, metaphorically ‘devour’ one another. Born under the shadow of poisonous plants and predatory instincts, a priest gradually turns cruel through his own hardness and jealousy. Despite worshipping the goddess day and night, when he receives no reward, he resolves to break her idol. Troubled by this, the goddess finally appears and grants him a strange boon, which is transformed by the priest’s envy into a curse.

Meghna Roy Choudhury

For the showcase, Meghna shared insights from her ongoing playwriting journey, reflecting on her process, her exploration of science as storytelling, and excerpts from her upcoming work 'The Archive on the Wall' - a science realism/fiction play that explores the intersection of memory, scientific thought and political erasure, set against the backdrop of a crumbling flat in contemporary Mumbai. After her mother’s death, Aparna, a physicist-turned-archivist, returns to her childhood home to sort through belongings. But when she begins scanning the old walls for data backups, she discovers that the house, particularly one wall, retains more than just structural history. Through distorted recordings, flickering projections, and recovered voices, the wall reveals fragments of her mother’s suppressed political past, Aparna’s own repressed childhood memories, and evidence of state violence once thought lost. As the house nears demolition, Aparna races to decode what the wall has stored, confronting both personal grief and institutional amnesia.

The play is a meditation on truth in a time of erasure, where memory becomes an act of resistance, and science becomes a refuge for inquiry, doubt, and radical care.

Janhavi Pawar

Janhavi performed a self-referential solo ‘Rehearsing the Almost’, which spoke in silences, moved in stillness, and laughed at its own yearning, mirroring the performer’s soul, reflecting both the beauty and futility of the artistic pursuit. A performer stood between silence and sound, between being and becoming. An actor is seen in dialogue with her only companions: a pair of dancing shoes that wait — patient, untouchable, and impossibly near. What began as a poetic monologue on the craft of performance later evolved in tonality, elegance giving way to absurdity. What began as a dialogue turned to a chase, with the shoes becoming unattainable symbols of mastery, self-worth, and fulfilment. By the climax, she is caught in a tragicomic loop — always reaching, never arriving — embodying the eternal hunger of creation that lingers on, unsatisfied, essential, alive.

The awardees also spoke with the audience about their individual journeys, filled with challenges and possibilities, and the timing of the crucial support received. They shared their conviction that an involved and active audience is what truly keeps theatre alive and kicking.

The audience was filled with joy and hope in witnessing these thought-provoking performances and engaged in depth with the awardees post the event.

You can see the highlights of the performance here.

The full video of the performance can be seen here.

Photo and Video Credit: Virginia Rodrigues