Carnatic music marries theatre in The Madras Players’ ‘Trinity’, set to reach a global audience

The Madras Players’ ‘Trinity’, filmed by a four-camera set up, will be made available for a global audience in June

In 2020, the celebrated trinity of Carnatic music —Thyagaraja Swamy, Muthuswami Dikshitar and Shyama Sastry — was witness to thundering applause on a stage in Toronto, Canada. Rather, the musicians and actors who played them received the applause. Trinity, The Madras Players’ rendition of Seetha Ravi’s short stories translated by Prabha Sridevan, retired judge of the Madras High Court, has been on stage since 2018. The 66-year-old theatre group’s creation, which strings together the lives of these three musical stalwarts into a single narrative, marries Carnatic music and live theatre making it an intruiging “Indian musical” to international audiences.