TABLE RADICA
Immersive Performance (2019-ongoing)‘Performance artist Amitesh Grover creates a table for food, for archiving, for listening.’ - The Indian Express
“A vision, a kitchen, an eternity - Amitesh Grover cooks all these ideas together.” - The Asian Curator
“With seven sold-out shows, Table Radica offers more than just a performance.” - The Hindustan Times
“Grover creates an expansive idea of taste — in poetry, morals, strife, and failure” - Indian Curator
“A unique taste-performance comes to the city” - Ahmedabad Mirror
I first encountered Tanvir’s play Charandas Chor in 1999. It was my first theatre experience — one that rewired my imagination permanently. Twenty years later, I met him again, not in person, but through the scattered remains of an archive. And I found not a legend, but a flawed, ferocious, loving, and divided man — too human for his own mythology.
On the surface, TABLE RADICA is memoir-theatre. At its heart, it is an excavation — of memory, of myth, and of a man who redefined Indian theatre. This immersive performance draws from the life and legacy of Habib Tanvir (1923–2009), the iconic playwright, poet, and founder of Naya Theatre, whose work with Chhattisgarhi performers revolutionised Indian stagecraft.
But Tanvir’s story is more tangled than his triumphs suggest.
For over five decades, his company didn’t just perform together — they lived together, cooked together, wandered across villages and cities, building a theatre of radical intimacy. He won global acclaim, including the Edinburgh Fringe First Award, yet his journey was never smooth. His plays were banned at home. His politics were questioned. His finances teetered. His private life was marked by contradictions and silences — some tender, some troubling.
TABLE RADICA opens up this dual archive: the one that’s preserved, and the one that’s whispered. It is a table set with food, memory, and unresolved truths. As the audience sits to eat, they also taste history. Love letters are read aloud over the aroma of Hyderabadi biryani. Family photographs sit beside stage stills. Sherbet is served with stories of exile. Diary entries, forbidden letters, gossip, sketches, songs, and scandal — all converge in this sensorial, slow-burning experience of a life too complex to be canonised.
This is a performance that cannot be watched passively — it must be inhabited, absorbed, digested.
TABLE RADICA is the table where we sit with him now.
To listen. To eat. To remember — and to ask again what should be kept, and what must be questioned.
Duration: 90 minutes
Language: Hindustani & English
Menu: Contains meats, gluten, alcohol, dairy, and nuts
Directed & Performed by Amitesh Grover
Written by Sarah Mariam
Cooking by Kaushik Ramaswamy
Designed & Produced by Poppy Seed Lab
Lighting Design by Ankit Pandey | Photography by Radhika Agarwal
