The pandemic has led to theatre auditoriums and venues being shuttered, resulting in a lot of actors sitting idle at home. Their only avenue to practise their craft is online plays. But Bombay Theatre Company (BTC) is now offering another alternative. They are staging a festival called The Solo Act, for which they are calling on actors to record a monologue that is a maximum of five minutes long. The other criterion is that the pieces have to be selected from the works of any one of six English language playwrights — Henrik Ibsen, John Osborne, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller. The best entries will be screened on the company’s social media pages.

BTC founder Raveesh Jaiswal tells us that the deadline is May 2, and the entries will be judged not just on how well the actors can emote, but also what their diction is like. “We will also gauge how well they are sticking to the script because we are familiar with the works of these playwrights, so if anyone picks a passage from John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, for example, we will know what the context of the scene is,” he says.
  
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