Founded in 1955, The Madras Players is the oldest English theatre group in India. The group has over 300 productions to its credit, and focuses on presenting English plays on Indian themes.

We started out as a group of young theatre enthusiasts, mostly students, who were members of a play-reading group established by the British Council to promote English language theatre. Our early efforts were confined to Shakespeare and classic British and American plays. We then went on to present contemporary plays.

In the late sixties and early seventies, we attempted English translations of works by Indian playwrights. These plays were successful and well received by our audiences because of their relevance. Between 1963 and 1970, Girish Karnad was working in Madras and was an active member of our group as an actor, director and translator. To quote him – “In those seven years (with The Madras Players) I was involved with some twenty plays – by Pinter, Williams, Shaw, Beckett – and I learnt how language needs to be used on stage: the rhythm, the pacing, the allowances for breath and movement, the pause, the pitching. We also staged some translations of Sartre, Pirandello, Chekhov and so on, and quite diligently compared different versions before deciding on any one. This was excellent training and I asked myself why I couldn’t translate my own plays.”

In 2000, we celebrated the year of the Chennai playwright. We presented plays by playwrights based in Chennai and dramatised readings of works which emerged from participants in a theatre workshop directed by Mahesh Dattani, which we organised in collaboration with the British Council.

Since our golden jubilee in 2005, we have had a strong focus on working with Indian writing in English and English translations of Indian language texts. We have presented original stage adaptations of contemporary English novels, bestsellers and short stories by Indian authors. We have also presented works by authors from the Indian subcontinent. Today, we are an eclectic group, offering various genres and styles, working on texts from India and abroad.

Our journey over the decades has been enjoyable but not always easy. Theatre is an expensive activity. We strive for maximum professionalism in our work but we are strictly an amateur group, giving freely of our time and resources. With rising costs this has become difficult and we now depend increasingly on commercial and corporate sponsorship. Therefore, we appeal for more financial support so that we can continue our efforts to promote good theatre.

We acknowledge with gratitude the support we have always received from the British Council, Max Mueller Bhavan, American Center and Alliance Française.

Finally, our thanks to our loyal audiences – without you we would not have been able to travel so far.