Cocktail Plays

Yuki Ellias likes mixing different worlds. If her first play, Elephant In The Room, was a mix of myth and discovering one’s identity, Hello Farmaaish is all about space and women radio jockeys

- Priyanka Bhadani

As unpredictable as life is, it has strange ways of surprising us. Theatre actor and director Yuki Ellias was a radio jockey in her early twenties, in 2002; she never thought that she would one day be directing a play on community radio jockeys. After a successful tour of Elephant In The Room, which she directed and acted in, Ellias is now ready with Hello Farmaaish, premiering on August 18 at the Royal Opera House, Mumbai.

The play was born on the sidelines of last year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. “One of the composers, Pruthu Parab, showed me a news article about community radio stations led by women in India. I thought that would be a great premise for a story,” she said. The idea of mixing the two worlds came from her own experience. Post the tour, she would go on a bike trip with her boyfriend, wearing a lot of safety gear. It struck her as to what astronauts have to go through when they wear so much gear. “When I got back, I got in touch with Sneh Sapru, writer of Elephant In The Room, and started developing the story,” she said.

They started researching on community radio stations in India. “The ones that we found were in Mewat, close to the Rajasthan border—Radio Mewat and Alfaz-e-Mewat,” said Ellias, sitting in the open café of a newly opened performance space, Castiko in Aaram Nagar. “We had long conversations, especially with the women radio jockeys, and we got a lot of insight.”