Rebecca Gould. Picture by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

A troupe from Theatre of Science, a part of Theatre Royal Plymouth, is in the city for a workshop with stage personalities like Ramanjit Kaur, Katy Lai Roy, Suman Mukhopadhyay and Tathagata Chowdhury. City scientists and intellectuals are also taking part in the programme.

Similar workshops will follow at Prithvi Theatre in Mumbai and Art theatre in Bangalore to test the ground for an UK-India theatrical collaboration.

Productions conceived at the workshop may be staged later, but the initiative is essentially a “research project”, says Rebecca Gould, associate director, Theatre Royal. Gould and director Jeff Teare were part of Science Centrestage, an initiative that brought scientists and playwrights together to explore each other’s works and provoke debate on moral and ethical dilemmas of new science.

Science theatre is not unknown in Calcutta. The Birla Industrial and Technological Museum has been holding science drama festivals for students for years.

Teare, who has been associated with theatre for 30 years, was doing political plays before science theatre offered him “a different way of evaluating contemporary living”.

He explains: “Theatre here is not just a science project (though it does a lot of scientific explaining) — it deals with issues that are of immense importance in the UK and the Third World. Take the case of pesticides in Coke or the impact of a pharmaceutical company’s decisions on the developing countries or patenting of ayurvedic medicines. These are issues of political significance.”