sustained theatre

By Kamini Gupta

Theatre designer Kamini Gupta tells us the stories behind the sets

Nagamandala by Girish Karnad, directed by Sita Ramamurthy, Leicester Haymarket Studio Theatre

Structurally, the play is a story within a story in which the writer, Girish Karnad, weaves two Kannada folk- tales together. The first one comments on the paradoxical nature of oral tales in general: they have an existence of their own, independent of the teller, and yet live only when they are passed on from one story-teller to another.

The play presented many exciting design challenges — talking flames, a cobra that turns into a man, a fight between a dog and a cobra, and the coronation of a goddess.

To create the expansive sense of an Indian landscape in a small studio space, I chose to use a gauze sky cloth cyclorama and played with the scale of the other elements of the set like the ‘hut’ and ‘anthill’ which doubled up as the banyan tree in the village centre.