Our Journey

The formative years of Dummies Drama was characterised by experimentation with simple themes, all served with generous doses of comedy. The journey took off on August 28, 1998 at that hallowed shrine of Tamil theatre, Mylapore Fine Arts Club. The first play, titled Womans Rea centred around a bank scam and was warmly received by the audience.It was followed by Clinically Dead, which dealt with the clash between money power and honesty

The experimentation with the horror genre in its next play 13 failed though. It taught an important lesson that the initial turbulence phase was far from over and that the team could not afford to rest on its laurels. That the lesson was well learnt was confirmed by the warm reception of its next couple of plays, Udyogam Vayasu Lakshanam and Koothadi. The journey to excellence had well and truly begun.

In 2004, Dummies Drama took the first step towards creating a lasting legacy with Vinodaya Chittam, dealing with a man’s change in perception of life and driving home its impermanence in the grand scheme of things. It won several awards at the Kodai Nataka Vizha where it was inaugurated and remains one of the flagship plays of the troupe to this day. Too Much, inaugurated in 2007 marked a return to the troupe’s early days of full-length comedies and came as a breather amidst serious themes

The idiom of ‘age being just a number’ found expression with Viswaroopam, also inaugurated the same year. The next play, Vinoda Vidumurai dealt with the travails of technology and a fast-paced life, where, to quote WH Davies ‘there was no time to stand and stare’. It was also around this time that Dummies Drama’s close association with legendary director Shri K Balachander was strengthened, with V Sreevathson writing the script and R Giridharan composing the music for his theatre comeback Pournami

Legacies, such as the one created by Vinodaya Chittam often create a burden, for all succeeding endeavours are measured against it irrespective of the appropriateness or otherwise of such comparisons. It took Athithi, inaugurated in 2009 to redraw the peak in the Dummies journey. Its important lessons on the way to lead life and navigate its troughs and peaks continue to find resonance amongst the audience to this day, several of whom have watched it multiple times since the inaugural show.

Shyamalam, dealing with the emotional attachment to a house, was inaugurated in 2011 and is considered one of the troupe’s classics. 2012 marked an important year in the annals of Team Dummies, for it welcomed many new-comers to the troupe. For the first time in its journey, two plays, Parikshai and Memory Minus were inaugurated on succeeding days with completely different casts. The base had been set for large scale productions that would mark the next phase in the Dummies journey.

With an expanded cast and crew, Dummies Drama started inaugurating multiple productions in a year from 2014. Hanuman, a tribute to Dr Vikram Sarabhai and India’s space mission inaugurated that year, was a trendsetter in terms of the increased use of technology onstage. The climax of the play remains its most defining feature. Payanam, a travelogue inaugurated in 2015 struck a chord with many families with its immense relatability.

Prathibimbam, inaugurated later that year, marked a special occasion, for it was the 25th script of the writer and one of the founders of Dummies Drama, V Sreevathson. An attempt at a docudrama was made for the first time in 2016 with Vaayu, the story of how India got its first family car, Maruti. It was however not all smooth sailing, as the political satire Yaarukkum Vetkamillai failed in 2017. With the audience base widening to include several youngsters new to the art form, it was time to reinvent the format of entertainment.

Akin to the T20 in cricket, the troupe started venturing into the genre of short-plays. A start was made on Dec 31, 2017, when the troupe staged three short plays as part of the inaugural series to commemorate 20 years of the Dummies journey. A remarkable feature of the short plays was that they were written by two members of Team Dummies, the results of an effort to create a new line of writers who would bring in a whiff of fresh air to Tamil theatre.

That these, and subsequent short plays written by other first-time writers in the troupe have been received with the same enthusiasm as the full-length productions is sufficient indication that the path ahead for the genre is bright. A related offshoot was the launch of Dummies Production House, an attempt to present short plays and themes using the medium of YouTube. In January 2020, the troupe paid a unique tribute to legal luminary Nani Palkhivala with Dharaniyin Perumai, a docudrama on the occasion of his birth centenary.

In October 2021, Dummies Drama welcomed its first representation on the big screen, with the OTT release of the movie Vinodaya Sitham, an adaptation of Vinodaya Chitham by director P Samuthrakani. As the world of theatre navigates through these uncertain times brought about due to the pandemic, Dummies Drama seeks the continued support and patronage of all its stakeholders in its ongoing endeavour to contribute to the betterment of the art form.