Powerful People

THEATRE AND THE POWER OF INCLUSION

by Sohaila Kapur November 5 2026, 12:00 am Estimated Reading Time: 10 mins, 34 secs

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The World’s A Stage And We, The Performers: Sohaila Kapur interviews Anirudh Nair on theatre, Shakespeare, social privilege and Bargad, his pioneering initiative creating opportunities for marginalised communities through performing arts and inclusive theatre education.  

For Anirudh Nair, life and drama are seamlessly interwoven.

I wrote about Anurag Chauhan in one of the issues. A bright young teenager who opened an NGO that did wonderful work among marginalised communities. Anurag now has widespread recognition and support from the rich and the famous for his work. But there are those who are bravely struggling to build their own institutions, without the hype and glamour. Anirudh ‘Rudy’ Nair is one of them.

A young theatre practitioner who made serious waves when he entered the arena as a trained actor, but chose instead to mentor youth from marginalised communities; those who had aspirations to excel in the performing arts but had no means or opportunities to do so. Anirudh’s drama school, Bargad, aims to do just that. Not only does it provide bursaries and train deserving candidates, but it is also attempting to help create an environment where these graduates can earn their living as theatre practitioners. This includes young women who are even less hopeful of breakthroughs in the conservative communities they live in.

I first met Anirudh in 2003. Long-haired, lanky. A typical Delhi University student from an elite college. I was judging an inter-university drama competition. He stood out with his clarity of speech and big, expressive eyes. He won an award for acting. I even cast him in one of my satirical plays.

I never dreamt I would meet him 20 years later as an accomplished and very much in-demand young actor and trainer. He is adored by his students. My son, who was in his theatre class at Shri Ram School, was a big fan. It’s no surprise because Anirudh ‘Rudy’ Nair is an irresistible combination of warmth, intelligence, accessibility and sensitivity and, above all, is an impassioned theatre maker. He lives and breathes theatre and, in time, may step into the shoes of legendary theatre gurus.

‘Rudy’, as he is known in his theatre community and among his students, believes life and theatre are intertwined. Like Shakespeare (whose work he specialised in) had opined, “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players”. His plays are immersive, with the audience invited to participate. Breaking the fourth wall has become a common practice in theatre today, but Rudy does it in his own unique way. His productions are site-specific, and the audience moves along with the actors, as in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and The Winter’s Tale, which he co-directed. He started his own theatre group, Wide Aisle Productions, in 2005 and collaborated with Neel Chaudhuri’s Tadpole Repertory.

Chaudhuri was an upcoming young playwright who won the Hindu MetroPlus Playwright Award for his play Taramandal in 2010. The group focused on rigorous physical and psychological performance training before working on classical and contemporary Western scripts. Later, Rudy turned to his hallmark Shakespeare performances and educational workshop for schools, Meet Will.

As a multitalented (actor, director, scriptwriter, teacher, dedicated student) and eloquent person, it’s best to let him speak for himself.

Your educational background?

BA Hons. History, Delhi University and MA in Theatre Practice under the guidance of Prof. Phillip Zarrilli, University of Exeter, UK (2007–08).

The Transformative Power Of Theatre

Why theatre?

I firmly believe, through my own personal experiences, that theatre has the power to transform those who engage with it in a way that remains unique and irreplaceable. Transforming audiences who witness performances, of course, remains a driving desire, but the power of a carefully constructed theatre process, one that is honest, compassionate, empathetic and truly stems from a curiosity to understand ourselves and the world we live in, has a power like no other form I have experienced.

You’re visiting faculty at the National School of Drama, Delhi. Why didn’t you study theatre there?

Prof. Zarrilli was someone I read and studied long before I went to train with him. He had spent over a decade in Kerala researching and training in Kathakali and Kalaripayattu and was an incredible pedagogue who developed a performer training programme for contemporary practice derived from these ancient forms. That appealed to me, and I decided to join his course.

What impact did the course have on you?

I’ve lived in Delhi all my life, but both my parents come from Kerala. And so it felt quite confusing to be in a corner of southwest England, training using Kalari, taught to me by a white American professor! But the effect the training had on my body-mind (a compound word used often by Prof. Zarrilli) was profound and shaped my own practice deeply. It was my intellect that had to play catch-up with the idea.

What did you do on your return?

I trained for two years in Kathakali at the International Centre for Kathakali in Delhi under my ashaan (guru), Evoor Rajendran Pillai.

While in the UK, I also encountered Eastern European physical theatre practices that resonated deeply with me. For many years afterwards, I trained and devised work with Anna Helena McLean, who had recently left the “Gardzienice” centre for theatre practices in Poland.

I also did, and am currently engaged in, Emotionally Integrated Voice training with Fides Krucker. For the last three years, I have been part of an intensive teacher training programme to learn this approach to working with voice and song.

Shakespeare, Performance And The Actor's Journey

Your work as an actor, after your training?

Back home, I worked on several productions with Sankar Venkateswaran – another key influence in shaping my own practice. I simultaneously worked a lot with Shakespeare, particularly with the Shakespeare Ensemble in London, working with Original Practices – a process that attempts to replicate, as closely as possible, how Shakespeare might have been performed 400 years ago, and to see what our contemporary practice can learn from this. An immersion in Shakespeare gave me a grounding in working with text in a way I did not have before.

I am also a Company Member of the Wender Collective (Chicago) and the Shakespeare Ensemble (UK).

...and as a teacher?

I am Co-Founder and Course Director of Bargad – a fully funded theatre training programme for marginalised performers. I am the Co-Artistic Director of Guild of the Goat in Delhi. I am visiting faculty at the National School of Drama, Delhi, and also the Drama School, Mumbai.

Bargad: Making Theatre More Inclusive

As actor, director and writer, you’ve done a lot of critically appreciated work nationally and internationally. What made you focus on marginalised youth? It’s not without its struggles, considering you could have comfortably made a living as an actor and director in the mainstream…

Bargad was born out of two significant events in my life and a whole bunch of ensuing conversations over many years between Amba (the co-founder) and myself.

In 2017, I was part of a play called Criminal Tribes Act, directed by Sankar and devised by Chandru Ninasam (my co-actor) and myself, along with Sankar. It was a play that explored Chandru’s and my relationship with caste. As I said earlier, good theatre transforms those who engage with it. This process transformed me.

Researching and devising this play was my first real encounter with what caste really meant. It was also, I’m ashamed to confess, my first encounter with Ambedkar’s writings in any real way, and it was the first time I was truly confronted with my own privilege. Until this moment, I had lived quite blindly, in a bubble of privilege, and would have continued to do so had it not been for this encounter with Chandru (to whom I am eternally indebted for this awakening) and this material.

In 2020/21, during the pandemic, as a result of Amba’s and my association with (at the time) Walkabout Theatre in Chicago (now the Wender Collective), we were engaged in many conversations that grew out of the BLM (Black Lives Matter) movement that echoed throughout the theatre community there. We watched as oppressive and exclusionary practices were called out by BIPOC artists, fearlessly challenging a predominantly white-controlled industry.

It was not hard to see how our own urban contemporary theatre practices back home suffered from many of the same oppressive structures – who gets to occupy mainstream spaces, who gets to tell stories, what stories are told, who gets funding, and consequently, the audience that engages with these stories. All of these are highly gatekept by caste-, class- and social-capital-based access and privilege.

As a result, in the last two decades or so that I have been working in Delhi, I don’t believe contemporary theatre has seen any significant change in the demographics of those who create, watch or engage with it. Neither has the existing demographic burgeoned.

Bargad did not grow out of charitable intentions. It grew out of a passionate love for theatre and a consequent belief that until and unless the kind of stories being told start to change and begin to include the stories that have hitherto been marginalised and excluded; until the storytellers who occupy our mainstream and often exclusive elite spaces come from those marginalised communities that make up 90% of this country; until these voices start to take up space in a way that they cannot be ignored, cannot be unseen, urban contemporary theatre will cease to have any meaning or relevance.

Bargad is currently funded by a group of individual donors who contribute anywhere between 10,000 and 10 lakhs each. This is incredibly hard to sustain year on year. We are desperately hoping for some institutional or CSR funding to allow this to live on.

Bargad basically trains in Hindi. This transition from English to Hindi...how difficult was it, considering you and Amba were both involved in Western and therefore English-language theatre?

I don’t believe language in this sense is significant in theatre or in theatre training. We have, for instance, teachers at Bargad from Bangalore who barely speak any Hindi, working with a cohort that might be primarily Hindi-speaking. This has never been a hurdle. On the contrary, these have been some of our best teachers, and the work they have created with the students has been incredibly special.

The Future: Taking Arts Education Beyond The Stage

Future plans?

The plan is nothing more than to keep Bargad alive year on year for many, many, many years. That itself feels challenging enough! But some dreams: alongside Bargad, to run a parallel programme that takes arts-based education out to children in communities that would have no access to the arts or such arts-based training.

The fancy school might have a ‘theatre class’, but few children who go to government schools, small private schools or even those engaged in informal education have access to quality arts-based education. And there are thousands and thousands of such schools all over the country.

If we could find the funds to be able to pay graduates of the Bargad programme and equip and train them as teachers and facilitators to be able to go out to such communities and schools, it would kill two birds with one stone – access to arts-based education for communities who don’t have any, and sustained, gainful, meaningful arts-allied work for graduates of the Bargad programme.

Who applies for the programme?

We are currently largely limited to applicants from the Delhi-NCR region. We have had 2–3 students in every cohort who have come to Delhi specially for Bargad, but our limited funding, and consequently the limited bursary we are able to give every student, makes living in Delhi for those who don’t already have a home here quite difficult. A Bargad in different cities – in Bombay, Bangalore, Kolkata, Chennai – further increasing access for aspiring artists around the country, is what we hope for.

Post Script: Bargad has a distinguished faculty of 17 from Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai, teaching all aspects of theatre-making, including former Director, NSD, Anuradha Kapur, whom he calls "one of the best theatre teachers and pedagogues whom I have had the privilege of working with". Some of the other theatre makers who have influenced Anirudh in his formative years have been director Neelam Mansingh, performer Maya Rao and theatre teacher Amrita Lalljee, from whom he learnt the art of facilitation.