thanks to the covid19 crisis witnessing live performances seems like a distant dream for theatre enthusiasts but a few artistes have found ways to break the barricade and livestream their work online and then there are those who decided to go back in time and play plays listening to plays on the radio has been a favourite pastime of generation x and millennials have been hearing plays on cassettes though many classic tamil plays are still available digitally chennai theatre group theatre marina has used this lockdown to come out with a whole new bunch of audio playsr giridharan director and one of the founding members of the group says they have come out with five audio plays since may talking about how this idea popped up he says a couple of theatre groups performed live on videoconferencing apps a few others put up prerecorded plays on their social media pages i felt these wouldnt work in the long run as the quality of the sound and video was compromised thats when we thought we should try out audio playsthey started with the play malayangulathu ninaivugal which they put out on their youtube channel and were encouraged to try out more plays after they were pleased with the response we wanted to try out something on the lines of a radio drama and it was readily accepted the first play had only two characters conversing at a tea shop we then dramatised our stage plays into audio versions puratchi onguga and kizakku aambalapattu we then worked on a new script mandram vandha thendral which we released last week this week we came out with another new play tik tik all our audio plays are no longer than 15 minutes we are now writing something that has humour he addsgiridharan admits that writing an audio play comes with its own set of challenges since there is no visual representation we need to convey it all through voice acting you just cant shout into the mic there has to be a certain pitch to the voice he says the script goes through plenty of changes and then we do multiple rehearsals we then record the play and go on to the postproduction we are new to this format and after many trials and errors we are now confidenttheatre artiste maya s krishan has also been working on an audio play we want to bring out a radio version for one of our popular plays you can always make things seem larger when you do a play visually but when it comes to audio you need to even write the dialogues in a different manner you just cant adapt the same script for audio she says i have heard tamil plays on cassettes and they are so good the minute we shut our eyes and listen we travel to the place where the play is set i am glad that lockdown is helping us experiment with things we wouldnt have done otherwise