The fact that these youngsters are scripting their own plays is of vital importance, feels Rimi B. Chatterjee, author and English professor at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. “Tin Can reintroduced the trend of scripting original plays in the city. English theatre in Kolkata needed this infusion of fresh thoughts,” she says.
“We wanted to use populist imagery and situations to drive the point through. The play was a conflux of ideas,” says Basu. Like in Tin Can, democracy is the essence of the set-up here too. “Everyone has a say. We brainstorm together. In fact, we urge all our members to come up with ideas. No matter how tentative they seem,” says Rehman. Which is why the group doesn’t limit itself to a specific genre.

“We are open to different media. It may be cinema, theatre or even art,” says Rehman. Their next project is most likely a “performance exhibition” which will involve installation art.
The latest addition to the list is Exit, staged earlier this month, which was put together by 25 students from various schools of the city, and protested “institutionalisation and the myth making function it entails”. “It was about two 18-year-olds who wanted to break barriers. Who were fed up of being conditioned,” says Rehman, the director of the play.
Members of Tin Can are ready to break new barriers. They have launched a film career with the recently released Bengali film, Madly Bangali.

At Exchange, the festival to be held in Edinburgh in July, they will perform Intro again. “We decided to go back to Intro because the play has the capacity to metamorphose into something new. It is set in a set in a Kolkata bylane, seen through the eyes of a muppet in a gallery. It’s about street urchins and garbage girls and we have tried to recreate a typical Kolkata scene,” says Kanti. The play will be staged in the city before it travels to Scotland, and Tin Can members are excited about it. “When we first staged the play, Kolkata wasn’t used to our kind of theatre. Today things are different. The English theatre scene in the city has changed a lot, the way the audiences react to play will be different,” he says.