There are theatre directors who tell stories, and then there are those who create worlds. Roysten Abel belongs firmly in the second category. Over three decades, he has built a body of work that sits at the intersection of folk tradition and contemporary theatre, of the ancient and the urgent, of the local and the unmistakably global. His productions do not follow the conventional grammar of the stage. They listen to something older, and then they find a way to make it speak to a room full of people who may have never encountered it before.
That ability, to take what is disappearing and make it feel radically alive, is what has made Abel one of the most distinctive Indian theatre directors today.
A Path Nobody Predicted
Abel was born in Kerala and showed no signs in his youth of the direction his life would take. As per his parents' wishes, Abel initially chose commerce as his career and joined a business college, but dropped out twice. However, only when Abel joined the National School of Drama and graduated in 1994 did his path become clearer. The next year, he apprenticed at the Royal Shakespeare Company in London, where he acquired technical skills and an understanding of theatre at its best, without any apologies.
Abel returned to India in 1995 and formed the Indian Shakespeare Company, where he produced classical theatre before taking the turn which made him the person he is today. His 'Othello: A Play in Black and White,' which he produced in 1999, helped him gain international recognition and opened many stages of the world to him. But it was what happened next which defined his ambition in a true sense.
Abel started being drawn towards performers from the fringes of Indian cultural life, such as street magicians, acrobats, puppeteers and traditional musicians whose culture was either dying or being kept alive in an impersonal way. Rather than document these forms, he activated them, placing folk performers on global stages and asking what happened when ancient rhythms met contemporary theatrical design. The answer, as it turned out, was extraordinary.
The Manganiyar Seduction
More than any other work, The Manganiyar Seduction captures the artistic essence of Roysten Abel, and there are few works in the long history of Indian theatre that have gone as far or stayed on the road as long as this one. In the work, Roysten uses master musicians from the Manganiyar folk tradition in Rajasthan. These musicians have been making devotional and celebratory music as a part of their heritage for hundreds of years. They are placed in a stunning architectural structure of lit windows that come one after another, and all at once, in such a way that it becomes impossible to speak of a work of art but rather of an invocation.
And this is precisely the understanding that The Manganiyar Seduction creator had; he knew that folk traditions needed no translation into the modern age, only presentation. The Manganiyar Seduction has spent over two decades doing exactly that, moving across continents to cities including London, New York, Paris, Sydney, Vienna, Singapore, and Dubai, among many others. Each performance carries the same pulse. No two evenings are ever identical.
In August 2025, the production came to Prestige Centre for Performing Arts in Bengaluru, bringing with it everything that has made it a modern landmark of world theatre. For the audience at PCPA that evening, it was a reminder of what live performance is capable of when the work is conceived with genuine vision and executed without compromise.
A 100 Charmers
If The Manganiyar Seduction proved that Abel could take a musical tradition and give it a stage worthy of its depth, A 100 Charmers proved that he could do something arguably more difficult: take a community that had been pushed almost entirely to the margins of Indian cultural life and restore to them a dignity that no policy or preservation effort had managed to give back.
The been, the wind instrument played by snake charmers across North India, has for generations been associated with a practice that is now widely understood to be harmful. The communities that played it found themselves increasingly without livelihood or cultural standing. Abel's response was neither sentimental nor simplistic. Born from years of field research and developed in collaboration with Bahar Dutt's Jeevika Foundation, A 100 Charmers brought together over a hundred snake charmers, many of them village heads from across North India, and turned what had always been a solitary instrument into a collective one.
The inspiration, as is characteristic, came from an unexpected place. A train ride through Edinburgh, where the sound of Scottish bagpipes filled the city, sparked the question of what it would mean to recreate that experience with the been. The answer required patience, training, and the kind of logistical determination that Abel has made something of a signature. These were solo performers who had never played together. Building them into an orchestra took time, and the result was a soundscape unlike anything most audiences had ever heard.
No snakes. Just a hundred instruments, a hundred voices that had refused to be erased, and a director who believed they deserved to be heard.
A 100 Charmers comes to Prestige Centre for Performing Arts on 26 July 2026. It is a production that carries, in every note, the particular weight of something that nearly disappeared and did not.
What Makes Abel Singular
The thread running through everything Roysten Abel, the Manganiyar Seduction creator, has made is a refusal to treat tradition as something to be protected behind glass. In his hands, folk memory is not a museum exhibit. It is living material, capable of surprise, of beauty, and of speaking directly to the present moment if given the right conditions to do so.
At the Prestige Centre for Performing Arts, those conditions exist. And when a great Indian theatre director like Abel brings his work to a stage built to hold it, the result is the kind of evening that justifies everything a performing arts venue is built for.
