The Urban Theatre Project
The audience in silhouette on the studio floor, watching a lit stage under draped saris.

A laboratory of live experiments.

Research, incubation and performance in a hundred-year-old house on Kabir Road, Kolkata. Forty-five seats, a foot from the performer. Come one and all.

Last at the house

Nothing on the board this week. The next thing is usually announced on Instagram with a week to go, and the seats go fast.

  1. Sat 19 to Sun 20 SepThree commissioned plays, rehearsed readings7pm
  2. Mon 14 SepGaram RotiDurga Venkatesan5pm and 8pm
  3. Fri 31 JulCotton StainersGram Art Project5.30pm and 7.30pm

All dates

The house

A shy-of-a-century-old Kolkata home, excavated brick by brick. Whitewashed walls, teak doors, a marble floor that seats about forty-five people a foot from the performer. Upstairs, a theatre library, a covered terrace and a room for a resident artist. There is a red sign in the lobby that says Now Showing, and it usually is.

Visit the house

The lobby: a red Now Showing sign above a poster, two brass lamps either side of the Urban Theatre Project board.

Projects

Three pieces have gone from a first draft to a world premiere in this room. The rest came to us: companies from Bombay, Auroville, Manipur, North Yorkshire and Ghent, bringing work to a house that sits its audience close enough to hear them breathe.

All projects

Workshops with Mahesh Dattani, Adishakti, with Vinay Kumar and Nimmy Raphel, Dr Stan Denman, Arundhati Ghosh, Alexander Wright of Wright & Grainger, Karen Houge, Bella Rahim, Shubham Roy Choudhury, and more, in the lab.

“Not just theatre that dazzles but theatre that gathers.”

t2, The Telegraph

In the press

  • Behind Backstage: amid dwindling funding and visibility, Calcutta's English theatre survives on grit, collaboration and an unrelenting love for the stage
    t2 on Sunday, The Telegraph
  • The Urban Theatre Project's Dekh Behen listens to the voices of women
    t2, The Telegraph
  • Wright & Grainger's modern retelling captivates India
    t2, The Telegraph

About

A workshop in the studio: participants sit in a circle on the floor between the teak doors.

Work here

This is a laboratory, not a venue. Artists come here to experiment, grow, and contribute to the larger live art world: rehearse a piece, incubate a new one from the first page, stay as a resident, or spend a week with a visiting practitioner. We are building a scaffolding for the live arts and the live artists, and we test the waters with experts who bring different skill sets to the city.

How to work here