A play truly comes to life once it is heard out loud. At The Drama Library, we have been thinking of ways to engage with plays that arenÂ’t in our collection, and formalise what is already happening in pockets. We want more people to read plays, and for theatre practitioners to deepen their craft.

To this end, Arghya Lahiri, director, playwright, light designer, and Phalguni Vittal Rao, our Librarian, have curated Volume 1 of Hear, Here! an in-person rehearsed reading series, where we will read plays we want to hear and works of playwrights we want to engage with more. Everyone is welcome, but if you work in the theatre, this is especially for you.

In the first edition, which took place in Mumbai across September and October 2023, we traversed plays written across the last century:

• Ashes to Ashes and A Slight Ache by Harold Pinter
  4 September 2023 | 6.30 pm | Read by Hrishabh Kanti & Phalguni Vittal Rao
• Top Girls by Caryl Churchill
  18 September 2023 | Read by Barkha Fatnani, Nimisha Desai, Phalguni Vittal Rao, Preeti Aher, Sharodiya Chowdhury & Vaishnavi RP
• The Seagull by Anton Chekhov
  9 October 2023 | Read by Aaryan Tandon, Asmit Pathare, Freya Kothari, Medha Agarwal, Phalguni Vittal Rao, Rashmi Khanna, Rushab Kamdar, Sidhant Seth, Vivek Madan and Sumit Rawal
• Blasted by Sarah Kane
  23 October 2023 | Read by Abhijeet Singh, Akassh Ghosalkar and Rashmi Khanna

We'll be back with Vol. 2 in January 2024.

If you have a play in mind you want to listen to out loud, drop us a line at [email protected].