What do finance professionals do in the midst of recession? Some of them put on make-up, dress up and act. Early this month, theatre critics in London were in for a surprise when a little-known group staged its first play at Rudolf Steiner House near Baker Street. Aks Performing Arts had been formed only this summer and none of the actors had professional training. They were all, surprisingly, finance professionals from Delhi working with firms in London. Before the curtains rose, every seat in the hall was taken and the cast put up a performance that impressed newspapers like The Independent.

“We thought only our friends and family would turn up; instead the hall was booked for shows,” says Neha Jain, a 26-year-old alumna of St Stephen’s, Delhi, and IIM-Bangalore who arrived in London three years ago to work for an investment firm. Occupied with investment portfolios, fund management, world markets and the frisky money graph, Jain itched to do “something creative”. And in the gloom of economic slowdown, she came up with Aks, a fun space where stage amateurs can come together: “There’s something missing in a life devoted only to work. Setting up a theatre group seemed the ideal solution as it would get people together in an artistic environment,” she says. For almost a year, she contacted “friends and friends of friends and their friends”, until the group finally took form in June 2009.

Aks has a large contingent from Delhi — Nidhi Kumra, Siddharth Nambiar and Ankur Chopra besides Jain herself. There are also Aditi Vadnagare from Pune and Canadian-Indian Neha Datta. Almost all of them are in the finance sector and as Nambiar puts it: “The challenge was to find time to rehearse since all of us are working and our hours sometimes stretch till late night.” They chose a daring debut — Mahesh Dattani’s 30 Days in September about abuse in a Delhi household. It was not the easiest play for a bunch of amateurs, but as Kumra, who studied at DPS, RK Puram, and handled production details of the play, says: “We felt it was a universally relevant subject that, unfortunately, nobody wants to talk about.”

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