Kathmandu’s theatre scene returns after the festival lull with a trifecta of new plays being staged this week. Same Time, Next Year at Kausi Theatre; Andheri Nagari Chaupat Raja at Mandala Theatre; and Shankuntala ko Aunthi at Shilpee Theatre are all going to show November 23.  

First staged at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in the US in 1975, Same Time, Next Year was written by Canadian playwright Bernard Slade and will be put on by the theatre group Katha Ghera at Kausi Theatre. The plot of this romantic comedy is fairly simple: it concerns an accountant and a housewife who meet for a romantic rendezvous once a year for two dozen years after their first meeting. They are both married and both have kids at home. The conversation they have at their yearly tryst makes up the heart of the play, wherein they share just about everything with each other, from the births and deaths they have seen to their personal, marital problems at home and how the world around them has changed. Katha Ghera’s rendition of the play has as its leads Akanchha Karki and Divya Dev, who last appeared together onstage in an iteration of John Osborne’s 1956 classic Look Back in Anger, which was staged at Mandala Theatre in November 2015. 

Same Time, Next Year is being directed by Che Shankar, who said that he related to the play the very first time he read it on a “very deep level”. “The friendship portrayed in the play is something we crave in our lives and it is this unfulfilled yearning that makes it beautiful,” he said. Same Time, Next Year opens at Kausi Theatre in Teku, on November 23, 5pm onwards. 

Opening the same day at Mandala Theatre in Anamnagar is Andheri Nagari Chaupat Raja (‘Crazy king rules over a dark kingdom’), which is a restaging, following a previous run at Kunja Theatre in May this year. The play, a political satire, is a Nepali adaptation of Indian author Bharatendu Harishchandra’s famous play of the same name. Andheri Nagari showcases how a hypocritical king who fails to deliver on his promises does a disservice to his citizens and ultimately himself. The play received tepid reactions when it was first staged. 

“Despite its flaw (narrow political imagination and stereotypical depiction of its characters), Andheri Nagari, owing to its lyrical translation and the synchronicity in the interplay between performance and music, has to it some outstanding qualities. The verbosity of the play is properly countered and balanced by the sheer physicality of the acting… you will remember the great acting, even if you forget the rest,” read a review published in the Post. Directed by Ashish Ghimire and Sangeet Sapkota, the play’s cast remains unchanged with Praku Pandey, Dipendra Shahi, Jiwan Bhattarai and Sanjeev Malla. 

Another play, Shakuntala ko Aunthi, is about a play-within-a-play and its connection to the real lives of its actors. This play is being produced by Actors’ Studio and will go on stage at the Shilpee Theatre in Battisputali. Billed by the producers as an “existential play”, it tells a love story involving an actress and a director (who also doubles as an actor in the play). The incidents they portray in the play-within-the-play starts to eerily match real life happenings. Adapted from Indian playwright Surendra Verma’s Shakuntala ki Anguthi, the play features actors Aashish Shrestha, Anil Thapa, Anu Neupane, Anup Neupane and Deeya Maskey. Suraj Malla directs the Nepali rendition and like the lead characters in the play also doubles as an actor.