There are some performances that lend themselves to recording and an opera or ballet may, because it’s got a lot of music. We add a lot of cinema techniques to this whole concept, to give you a completely different experience. Recording a play would not work. We take many takes, different angles, we light it for camera and the acting is for camera. We shoot it like cinema, where it’s shot over several days. “The plays are shot specifically for CinePay in a studio. We’re not recreating it but we are trying to complement theatre by giving you a richer experience of that.”

When you watch it on television or when you watch it in a stadium, it’s actually the same match but gives you two completely different experiences. People said it was a very different experience not comparable to live theatre, but they caught things they had missed in the live production.

Surprisingly, when we did Between the Lines and showed it to our friends from theatre and cinema and a general audience, they loved the experience. “The first thing we did was to experiment with our own production. On the challenges of adapting theatre for screen And then Nandita said, ‘Why don’t you call it CinePlay?’ And I thought that was a great way of coining the word because it really communicates what I want to say. You know it’s theatre because the way the script and the story is told is very theatrical, very dramatic. So that’s when I thought about merging the two. We try to do it here and it does not work very well because the grammar of theatre and the grammar of cinema is completely different. Why not capture it in an interesting way and make sure that people could watch it without these constraints? There is some history of people recording live theatre. There is great content, story and entertainment in theatre. Other theatre producers faced the same problem: being geographically locked into the city that they started in. We got so many invitations from all over the world, which we had to turn them down for logistic issues or mismatched budgets. Originally, the idea was to do maybe 10 shows and then close the production. “I did a theatre production with Nandita (Das) called Between the Lines, in 2012.

Cineplay watch movies online