Meet the Balaji Telefilms of Mumbai theatre

With over 40 shows scheduled until July (and more being added to the list) Akvarious Productions is turning into one of the most prolific theatre groups in the country. Find out how the young team makes it work

Once upon a time, not too long ago, Ekta Kapoor's Balaji Telefilms ruled every TV channel with their saas-bahu babble. The production house earned awards and their actors and actresses acquired fame. Soon enough, Balaji came to be associated with the word 'prolific'. On the Mumbai theatre scene, Akarsh Akvarious Khurana's Akvarious Productions seems to be going the same way. In the last ten years, they have had 32 productions.

The core team of Akvarious Productions at their adda, Akvarium.
PICs/Santosh Nagwekar

This year, they've already premiered four new plays, and in the next three months, the group has more than 40 shows planned. Last month, at the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards (META), they bagged four prestigious awards. We decided to ask the 31-year-old actor-director-producer-playwright, who also managed to fit in a wedding in his busy schedule, where he intends to go from here.

Aren't 40 shows in three months too much by Mumbai theatre standards?
It's too less, no? Ideally, I would love to do 365 shows a year, Okay, make that 300, 365 shows makes it sound like a corporate job. But even if there are 50-odd shows, they are of five or six different plays, so the load is reduced on the actor. See, May is a particularly busy time because of Summertime (at Prithvi) and we were aiming to have about 20 shows for it. Also, I usually land up travelling to Bangalore in May and October / November. So that's how the numbers add up.

How does Akvarious Productions manage to have so many productions?
We completed a decade last year, but the first few years were just one show a year. 2007 was the turning point, because the next year we had eight productions. Then 2009 had only four productions, which was a conscious decision, because the plays that were launched in 2008 had to still run. In 2010, we had seven new plays.

Isn't Akvarious Productions getting more ambitious with its plays now that you guys have reached a certain level of security?
I hope not, actually. Ambition is good, but we still need to be practical and economical about things. We'd like to do large productions, but I'd allow it for a play like Peter Pan because I know there is a dedicated audience for it. Children's plays do allow you that kind of liberty. Last year, of the two plays that I directed, one had two actors and the other had four. I am trying to keep it small, because I want to travel with the plays. I think that there is an entire market out there that needs to be tapped. So now I need at least five or six productions with a small team. So, I'm consciously down-sizing. Growth is inevitable. You master a certain thing and then you want to do more. We want to do a musical. I know that will take 30 people, but it should be balanced with plays that are generating profits, so that we can afford to risk something like this.

Yet the group is producing more and more plays...
I'm very happy with where the group is right now. But with every success the number of detractors also grows and people are waiting to see us fall. At this point, we're a bunch of gung-ho lunatics, who are willing to invest in something that may or may not give returns.

Do you have a business plan in place?
There isn't a point-wise agenda on the business plan, but I want to prioritise certain things like outstation shows. There are so many schools to look up for our children's shows, there are so many corporates to explore for plays like The Interview and we haven't even started.

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