Tahatto Behind the Scenes – A Small background of how AFTCW happened!

In this blog I will take you through the decisions we made before we decided to stage a play.

Tahatto as a group is made of people from all walks of life, advertising, sales, marketing, writing, editing, fashion designing, event management,  students and the inevitable IT. Being the hyper-energetic group that we are, we instantly started off trying to create something that we could perform for anyone who was willing to be a guinea pig. We dabbled with the idea of street plays for a while. This is mostly because we were not sure if we could commit to work towards a full stage production.

Ideas, brainwaves, plots and instances overflowed, but it was truly difficult to get 30 people to take time off from the daily professional grind and create a 20 min play. Yes, it sounds lame but it’s true. The silver lining was that we loved being with each other so much, we never lost hope.

During this time, we did put up a play with Miracle Entertainment at Alliance Francaise called “The Doctor Despite Himself”. It was a successful attempt and we were part of staging three houseful shows. The saying ‘nothing succeeds like success’ did make sense after that play. We loved the feeling of being good entertainers. It is truly addictive, this show business.

Tahatto always believed in togetherness and nothing fuels us more. So when we decided we will come up with a play, we thought nothing can bring people together like laughter. Hence we chose English comedy as our genre. This officially started our next mission – a play by Tahatto.

We searched for scripts all over the place. The restrictions were; small production, good comedy and something that we could relate to. We hunted online – www.hitplays.com being just one great hunting ground. We also read books of all great authors who wrote English comedy scripts. We split into teams that worked to choose scripts and finalize on two scripts. But guess what, surprise, surprise – that didn’t work too.  With all those meetings, we still did not have a script and an assigned team. Hopes were looking a little hazy now.

Then a ray of hope came through and after five months of constant effort, we got our first performance up and ready for an audience.

Evam came to our rescue again. CUT2 – Evam’s introductory weekend theatre acting workshop in May gave us an opportunity to perform a 20 minute play for the new batch. What all 30 of us could not do in 5 months, Namrta, Deepak and Piyush did in a week’s time. We had a play, ‘The Proposal’ that we staged and we got back into the right track again. I will definitely write about that play in the next blog.

The Proposal by Anton Chekov

The Proposal by Anton Chekov

Working for the proposal, got us together again and we seriously started our round-2 for the script hunt.  During this time, Prashanth our directorial volunteer rediscovered and re-stumbled across the television series – Blackadder. The story and comedy made so much sense and he immediately felt that we need to stage this script.

The series Blackadder, was extremely popular with four seasons. Each season created in a different era, The British middle ages, Britain during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, early 19^th century and the period during World War I.

Our play is based on the fourth season. This show came on air in 2000 and was ranked 16 in “100 Great British Television Programs”. The plot was set during World War I, about soldiers of Britain during their stay in the trenches. The genre is ‘ultimate comedy’ (I take the liberty to create this genre, but you need to believe me here). With this fair idea about our play, I will now leave you and be ready to read my next blog, what made us choose this play and yes about ‘The Proposal’.