For performer Govin Ruben, a lifetime of romantic misadventures has become the unlikely material for a Tamil-cinema-inspired cabaret. Developed with director Adriano Cortese, காதல் தோல்விகள் (The Failed Romances) is a funny, music-filled and unexpectedly vulnerable exploration of heartbreak, cultural identity, and the exhausting business of trying to become someone worthy of love.

In 2013, Govin Ruben was sitting on the rooftop of the Rex Hotel in Saigon with his friend and creative collaborator Terry. The hotel, a landmark of French colonial-era Saigon, had once been a gathering place for foreign correspondents during the Vietnam War. From its rooftop, over a drink, you could look out across the city and imagine the countless stories that had unfolded there.

On the television, however, was a rerun of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The guest was Nicole Kidman, who was recounting an awkward encounter with Fallon years earlier. She had gone to his apartment believing they were on a date; he had been in his pyjamas and apparently had no idea. Kidman had a crush on him. Fallon had missed the signals entirely. As she told the story, the comedian became increasingly mortified, clutching his wedding ring as he contemplated the romantic opportunity he had failed to recognise.

For Ruben, the scene was both hilarious and painfully familiar. Here were two people who had apparently liked each other, yet somehow managed to miss what was happening between them. And there he was, sitting thousands of kilometres from home, recently single and reflecting on his own romantic disappointments.

“Terry and I were watching this, and we thought: this is ridiculous. Here are two people who really like each other, and it’s still a failed romance,” Ruben recalls. “We were both recently single, and we had our own stories. We looked at each other and thought, ‘We should make a show about this.’”

It was an absurdly simple beginning for a work that would eventually become something much more personal. Over the following years, the idea passed through various incarnations: a musical, a jukebox musical, a stand-up show, perhaps even something that might eventually find a home on a West End stage. In 2019, Ruben received a grant from Creative Australia to explore the project, taking him on a journey that included learning tango in Buenos Aires and investigating the patterns, signals and unspoken rules that govern romantic relationships.

The research was not simply about how to attract someone. It was about understanding why people behave as they do when they fall in love, why gestures that seem obvious to one person can be incomprehensible to another, and why the same mistakes can keep recurring even when we think we have learnt from them.

Then came the pandemic, and with it a film that helped Ruben understand how his many ideas might fit together. Mera Naam Joker, Raj Kapoor’s 1970s Hindi film about a clown whose life and career are shaped by three great loves, gave him a framework for the stories he wanted to tell. Here was a performer whose public identity was built around making people laugh, while his private life was marked by heartbreak. The clown’s final performance became a way of looking back at the people and experiences that had shaped him.

“Suddenly, everything fell into place,” Ruben says. “I thought, this is how you tell the story. I’ve been this performing clown my whole life, with all these great loves. I realised this wasn’t necessarily a jukebox musical or a West End show. It was Bollywood. It was Tamil music, with the movies framing the idea.”

The result is காதல் தோல்விகள் (The Failed Romances), a ‘coming-of-age’ cabaret inspired by Tamil cinema, combining personal storytelling with a live six-piece band, movement, choreography and reimagined Tamil songs. Its stories are drawn from Ruben’s own romantic history, but the form is deliberately theatrical: the emotional extravagance of the movies meets the awkward realities of a life that refuses to follow a screenplay.

Yet the show that eventually emerged was not quite the light-hearted celebration of romantic disasters Ruben had first imagined. When he began working with director Adriano Cortese, the stories became the starting point for a more searching investigation into the forces that had shaped him, not only as a romantic partner, but as a Malaysian Indian, an artist and a person who had spent years trying to work out where he belonged.

Ruben and Cortese had known each other for years through their work in theatre. Ruben is also a theatre designer, and had designed for Ranters Theatre, the Melbourne-based company founded by Cortese, whose work is known for its distinctive approach to performance and its rigorous examination of stories, people and relationships. When Ruben approached him about the cabaret project in the period after the pandemic, Cortese was intrigued by the combination of Tamil cinema, personal history and romantic failure.

But he was not content simply to help Ruben arrange a collection of entertaining anecdotes into a show. “I usually interrogate stories about myself and the performers I work with, and this was no different,” Cortese says. “Govin came to me with a whole bunch of pages of stories from his life. It wasn’t a script; it was a lot of stories. So we waded through them and really interrogated them. One of the good things about having a relationship with Govin over time is that we can be rigorous with each other. We can ask what works and what doesn’t, what we should argue for and what we should leave out. We went backwards and forwards until we arrived at a script we both believed in.”

The process was as much about discovering what lay beneath the stories as deciding how to tell them. Why did a particular relationship matter? What had Ruben believed at the time? What did he understand differently now? And why did certain romantic experiences seem to repeat themselves?

As they talked, the project’s focus began to shift. Ruben had expected to examine the comic mishaps of his love life. Instead, he found himself looking at the beliefs he had inherited about romance, success and the kind of person he needed to become in order to be accepted.

The questions led him back to his childhood in Sentul, Kuala Lumpur, where his relationship with Tamil language and culture was complicated from an early age. His parents, concerned about the environment around them and the influence of gangs and drugs, wanted their children to speak English and avoid being drawn into the wrong circles. The family eventually moved to a more affluent area, where English-speaking environments offered the promise of opportunity and security.

His three sisters, meanwhile, were passionate Tamil-film fans. They watched films and spoke Tamil at home, giving Ruben a way into a cultural world that he was, in some respects, being encouraged to leave behind. “My parents didn’t allow us to speak Tamil when we were growing up,” he says. “They wanted us to speak English because they were worried about the environment we were in. They wanted us to move out of Sentul, to somewhere better, somewhere we could mix with people who spoke English. Both my parents had to work, so a lot of the babysitting was left to my three sisters, who were Tamil-movie fanatics. They spoke Tamil all the time, and I was secretly learning behind their backs.”

What might have been a straightforward childhood love of movies thus became something more complicated: an attachment to a language and a culture that carried its own contradictions. Tamil cinema offered Ruben a sense of wonder and belonging, but the wider messages he absorbed about class, language and respectability were not always compatible with that attachment.

The contradiction stayed with him. On one side was the world of Tamil movies, full of heightened emotions, grand gestures and unforgettable characters. On the other was a social environment in which speaking English could signify education, opportunity and distance from a less desirable past.

As Cortese kept asking questions, these tensions began to emerge as a central thread of the show. “The more we dug into Govin’s stories, the more we uncovered these very personal things,” Cortese says. “It became an investigation into the movies, the writing, the tropes and the stereotypes, and how those things affect the way we see ourselves. The story is a celebration of Tamil movies and Tamil culture, but it is also a gentle critique of how they can set us up for life. We can become confused between real life and the movies, and there are also these postcolonial hang-ups we carry, such as the idea that the West is best, that speaking English is better, that you should be a certain kind of person.”

For Ruben, the connection between these ideas and romance was difficult to ignore. If you grow up absorbing messages about which identities are desirable, which behaviours are respectable and what a successful life should look like, those beliefs do not simply disappear when you start dating. They become part of the way you present yourself, the people you pursue and the qualities you believe you need to possess.

The romantic failures, in other words, were not necessarily just about saying the wrong thing or misreading a signal. They were also about the expectations Ruben had carried into each encounter, and the distance between the person he was and the person he thought he ought to be.

Ruben is candid about the social pressure that comes with being single, particularly in a community where the markers of a successful adult life can be clearly defined: a good job, a nice car, a house, children (ideally a boy and a girl) and a partner who completes the picture.

By his own account, he has been best man at eight weddings. He has watched close friends move into marriage and parenthood while continuing to pursue a more itinerant, unpredictable life of travel, theatre and creative work. Their lives are not necessarily less interesting than his, nor is his automatically more fulfilling. But the comparisons are difficult to avoid, especially when other people begin asking questions.

“The fake answer is that it’s easy to be vulnerable,” he says. “The truth is, I enjoy telling stories, and I enjoy talking to people about why I’m single. It’s something that comes up when you’re with colleagues and friends, perhaps after a few drinks, when you get to know someone a little better. And as a 40-year-old Indian man in Malaysia, you inevitably become the weird guy who’s single.”

He laughs about being the friend whose lifestyle makes other people’s spouses suspicious. His married friends might be happy enough to hear about his latest travels, but their wives may be less enthusiastic if he inspires their husbands to start dreaming about Buenos Aires, Croatia or New York instead of the mortgage and family routine.

“You start becoming this person who doesn’t have the things society expects you to have,” he says. “People question you, they question your parents, and the question on everyone’s mind is, ‘Why are you single?’ We live in a world that is quite prescriptive about what success looks like. If you don’t have those things, people want to know what’s wrong. And in explaining that, in talking about the experiences I’ve had, I’ve realised that I’m quite happy to share my story, even with strangers.”

The humour is important, but so is the willingness to let the question remain unanswered. Ruben is not presenting his romantic history as a cautionary tale, nor is he claiming to have discovered a formula that will guarantee happiness. He is interested in what happens when people can speak honestly about the things that have not worked out, without automatically treating them as evidence of personal failure.

“I don’t find it shameful,” he says. “These are interesting scars. I’ve had these experiences in Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, all over the place. By being open and vulnerable, I hope the audience can also feel comfortable enough to be open and vulnerable after the show. They might start thinking about the decisions they’ve made in their own lives, and realise that they’re not alone in having things go wrong.”

That exchange between performer and audience is part of what makes the cabaret format so apt. Ruben is not simply recounting a series of past relationships from a safe distance. He is inviting people to consider the stories they tell themselves about their own lives, and whether those stories are helping them or keeping them trapped.

For some, the question of why they are single may carry genuine pain. For others, it may be a source of frustration, amusement or relief. The point is not to insist that everyone should want the same kind of relationship, but to make room for a conversation about the assumptions that make certain lives seem more successful than others.

Tamil cinema is a central presence in The Failed Romances, not just as a soundtrack but doublng as a cultural language through which Ruben’s experiences can be understood. Its romantic conventions offer a rich vocabulary of longing, attraction, rejection and sacrifice. Its heroes and villains provide recognisable archetypes; its music gives emotion a scale that everyday life rarely permits.

The production draws on that vocabulary through its live band, choreography, video and performance. Yet Ruben and Cortese were careful not to recreate a full-scale film musical onstage. The theatrical space is deliberately simple: a cabaret setting with a large screen, tables and small lamps, the band positioned to one side. The design allows the audience to move between the intimacy of personal confession and the spectacle of cinematic fantasy without losing sight of the person telling the story.

For Ruben, that restraint is especially important because he approaches the project as both performer and designer. “When you’re designing something like this, you’re creating a space where someone can be vulnerable and tell a story,” he says. “Sometimes theatre can be overdesigned. Designers want to make a statement, to show you their signature. But the principle I come back to is always the same: does it serve the show? Does it serve the work?”

The large screen becomes a canvas for the places and memories that shape the narrative, while the music and sound help carry the audience into different emotional worlds. Lighting and video can suggest a change of time or location without requiring elaborate physical sets. The result is a production that can gesture towards the scale of Bollywood while preserving the intimacy of one person standing onstage and telling the truth about himself.

“Bollywood can be about more, more, more; more choreography, more set pieces, more spectacle,” Ruben says. “But sometimes the more you allow the audience to imagine, the more they take away with them. This isn’t a musical in the conventional sense. We could have 24 singers and dancers, but that would defeat the purpose of the smaller moments, the moments when the story really comes to rest.”

Cortese shares that instinct. He wanted Ruben to remain the principal focus, with the video allowing the work to travel across places and periods without overwhelming the storytelling. “The story isn’t set in one fixed time and space, so we wanted Govin to be the principal element,” he says. “He tells us where we are, New York, Sentul, wherever the story needs to take us, and the video does the rest. The audience can see him, listen to him and follow the story. It’s about the form as much as the content: how you shift between past and present, how you change the rhythm, and how you allow the audience to move through the material with him.”

The production also required Cortese to immerse himself in a cultural world that was not his own. Ruben introduced him to Tamil films, they watched movies together, and Cortese undertook further research with the dramaturg, whose expertise in Tamil cinema helped the team check its assumptions and understand the cultural references more deeply. They also looked at online discussions and asked people about their relationships with Tamil movies, what they loved, what they questioned and what the films meant to them.

That research mattered because the production is neither an uncritical celebration of cinematic romance nor a dismissal of it. Tamil movies have been a source of pleasure, inspiration and cultural connection for Ruben. But they have also contributed to the expectations he brought to relationships, and the show asks what happens when the grand gestures of the screen collide with the ambiguity of real life. The movies may offer a script, but nobody can guarantee that the person on the other side of the romance has read it.

For Ruben, one of the most important distinctions in the show is between romance and love. The two are often treated as interchangeable, but he sees them differently: romance as the performance, the strategy, the set of gestures intended to win someone over; love as the feeling or relationship that may or may not emerge from it.

“Romance is an idea, but love is what it is,” he says. “I’ve had many ideas about how to romance someone, and many failed ideas about what love and relationships should be. I believe I’ve been in love a few times, and I’d like to believe people have been in love with me too. But what makes this interesting is the things I’ve done under the guise of romance, the dragons I’ve tried to slay, the mountains I’ve climbed. I don’t think anyone else has necessarily done all those things, but that’s what makes the stories mine.”

Cortese sees romance as a kind of game, one in which the participants may have very different understandings of what is happening. A gesture intended as an expression of devotion might be received as an imposition; a carefully planned romantic moment might leave the other person feeling uncomfortable or rejected. The problem is that neither person has complete access to the other’s thoughts.

“There’s attraction, and there are the actions people take within that space,” he says. “Romance is the game we play with one another. You have an idea of what you think love should look like, or what you think you should do to get someone to love you, but you don’t know what the other person is thinking. You might believe you’ve done the most amazing thing in the world, while the other person feels completely rejected or let down. One person thinks it means one thing, and the other person reads it as the opposite. That’s how things can start to fall apart.”

The comedy of The Failed Romances comes partly from these misreadings, from the distance between intention and effect. But the deeper question is why people invest so much in getting romance right in the first place. If we believe that the right gesture, the right appearance or the right version of ourselves will secure the relationship we want, then every failed attempt can feel like proof that we have not been good enough.

Cortese is careful not to suggest that there is a formula for avoiding heartbreak. In fact, he argues that if there were one, a show like this would hardly be necessary. “The more we search for the perfect person or the perfect relationship, the more likely we are to be disappointed,” he says. “Life isn’t about perfection. It’s about discovery. Some people are very lucky: they meet someone, fall in love and stay together. Other people don’t find that as easily, for all sorts of reasons. In Govin’s case, he’s been trapped, in some ways, by the world that Tamil cinema depicts. If there’s a message in the show, it’s that you need to release yourself from the things that trap you.”

That does not mean love is easy once the fantasy has been stripped away. Cortese is in a long-term relationship himself, and speaks of the decisions, struggles and compromises that come with sustaining one. Relationships have ups and downs; they are not made perfect by finding the right person. The work is in accepting that neither partner can be the idealised figure imagined by the other.

Nor can we expect another person to resolve every uncertainty we carry about ourselves. Before we can let someone into our lives, Cortese suggests, we have to become more honest about who we are and what we bring with us. “How do we start to love ourselves? It’s a huge question,” he says. “The first thing is to be honest with ourselves, to take away the nonsense and begin to be okay with who we are. We spend so much time trying to be who we want to be, rather than who we are. Sometimes that’s a form of not accepting ourselves. It isn’t about fixing yourself and becoming some perfect person. It’s about accepting who you are at any given moment.”

For him, self-acceptance is not a switch that can be flipped on after one particularly revealing conversation or one successful relationship. It is a lifelong process, complicated by grief, loss, childhood experiences and the baggage we inherit. Some of those experiences may never disappear completely. The challenge is to understand how they shape us without allowing them to dictate everything that comes next.

“Sometimes shame can be productive,” he adds. “It can make you humble and empathetic if you approach it in the right way. But it can also make you resentful or bitter. There isn’t a simple answer. You have to begin the process of grieving, letting go and accepting. Those wounds and issues may not all go away, but you can learn to manage them, and perhaps allow them to enrich you rather than control you.”

As the project developed, Ruben began to recognise how deeply his own insecurities had shaped the way he presented himself. He remembers going to Australia to study and becoming more conscious of his accent, polishing the way he spoke and changing aspects of his behaviour in an attempt to fit in. Looking back, he sees these adjustments as part of a longer struggle to feel that he was good enough.

That struggle was not confined to romance. It affected how he saw himself as an artist, how he spoke and how he imagined other people perceived him. The desire to become a more acceptable version of himself could feel like a sensible strategy for success, but it also meant moving further away from the person he actually was.

“I was so conflicted between being these different people to appease the people I liked,” Ruben says. “Over time, I became more comfortable with how I look, how I talk, my accent, even the way I smell. The less I tried to be this perfect version of myself, the more genuinely people seemed to connect with me. I realised that a lot of it came from this deep-seated feeling that I wasn’t good enough.”

He traces some of that feeling to the cultural and postcolonial pressures he grew up with, including the idea that speaking English, behaving in a certain way or appearing to belong to a particular social class would make him more worthy of respect. Those pressures can be subtle, particularly when they are absorbed in childhood and become part of what seems normal. It can take years to recognise that the standards we are trying to meet were never entirely our own.

Working with Cortese forced Ruben to confront those questions more directly than he had expected. The project began as a fun idea about failed relationships and Tamil cinema, but the repeated questions of why, why this story, why this memory, why this particular reaction, led him into much more vulnerable territory.

“Halfway through, I realised that because my parents never let me speak Tamil when I was growing up, I started to understand the deep-rooted shame that could come from that,” he says. “You begin to see the effects on your body and your mind. I’m sure a lot of Indians have had their own versions of these experiences growing up, even if the circumstances were different. For me, this process became therapeutic. Perhaps that’s why I do it. No one had really asked me these questions before.”

The process has also changed the way he thinks about performing. Onstage, an actor or entertainer is inevitably presenting something to an audience. There is a persona, a performance and an awareness of being watched. But Ruben is increasingly interested in what happens when he allows that performance to reveal rather than conceal something about himself.

“Life is more interesting when you don’t have all the answers,” he says. “I don’t necessarily want to find the answer to what makes a successful romance. What I hope the show does is make us aware that life is real and not the movies. You can be comfortable in your own skin, instead of always trying to be a character in a movie or putting on a mask.”

The realisation is not that he should abandon performance or stop dreaming. It is that he no longer needs to confuse the roles he plays with the person he is. He can love Tamil cinema without needing to live according to its romantic scripts. He can be a performer without needing to smooth away every aspect of himself that might make him feel different. And he can be single without treating that fact as an indictment of his worth.

For Cortese, the crucial step is allowing other people to see the person underneath the performance. “You can be fine with yourself, but when you’re with another person, you might still try to be someone else. That becomes a problem because they can’t really see you. We put on clothes, we want to be liked, we want to look powerful or successful, we want to be the man or the woman we think we’re supposed to be. But those things can become a front. We hide behind them.”

The pressures are intensified in a world where people are constantly observed and evaluated, including through social media and the internet. There are ideas about what a successful person should look like, what a desirable partner should be, and what parents, friends or society expect us to achieve. But not everyone fits the same template, and pretending to fit can make intimacy harder rather than easier.

“Sometimes you have to trust that you’re enough, that you’re okay,” Cortese says. “You have to let someone into your life and allow them to see who you really are. That is the difficult part.”

For all its reflections on identity and shame, The Failed Romances does not end with a neat revelation about how to find lasting love. Ruben is more interested in the smaller, more ordinary ways we learn to accept ourselves, including the pleasures we feel guilty about, the ambitions that overwhelm us, and the compromises that might actually make us happier.

He illustrates the point with a story about food. “Imagine someone asking what your ideal date would look like. You might begin by describing the perfect dinner: an excellent Argentine Malbec, a beautifully marbled Wagyu steak, tomato purée and charred broccoli. It sounds wonderful. But getting there requires effort: booking a fancy restaurant, dressing up, combing your hair and leaving the house. Perhaps the whole exercise starts to feel exhausting. You decide on something less ambitious, says, T.G.I.Fridays, and then something easier still, until you find yourself on the sofa having ordered in a Big Mac and fries,” he says.

“The next morning, you regret it. You promise yourself that you will eat better, make more effort and stop settling. And then the cycle begins again.”

For Ruben, the point is not that a fast-food dinner is equivalent to a romantic relationship, or that people should stop making an effort. It is that we can spend so much time measuring ourselves against an ideal that we fail to recognise what we actually want, or what would make us happy in the moment.

“I realised I should stop feeling ashamed about the Big Mac and fries,” he says. “It’s about understanding my guilty pleasures and acknowledging them, rather than constantly aspiring to something that feels so daunting that I never get around to doing it. There’s nothing wrong with having a Big Mac in the middle of the night. And when I stop feeling ashamed of that, I might also find that I’m more willing to make the effort to go out when I want to.”

The analogy is funny because it is so ordinary, but it gets at the heart of the show’s argument. We can become trapped by the idea of what a perfect experience should be, whether that means the ideal dinner, the ideal date or the ideal relationship. The fantasy can be so powerful that the imperfect reality feels like a failure before we have even given it a chance.

Ruben also recognises that different people meet different needs in our lives. There are people with whom he enjoys discussing books, others with whom he likes going to the movies, and others who offer different kinds of companionship. The expectation that one person must fulfil every need can be another version of the fantasy of perfection.

“People can be unhappy in relationships because they feel that their partner isn’t fulfilling all their needs, or isn’t giving them everything they think they should have,” he says. “But we’re all different. There are certain things I enjoy doing with certain people. We have to question this idea of perfection and what we’ve been told perfection is supposed to look like. When you’re alone, you might think, ‘Well, I could have a Big Mac.’ And perhaps you can just accept that, without turning it into a judgement about yourself.”

There is a gentle generosity in that idea. Self-acceptance does not mean abandoning ambition or refusing to grow. It means being able to distinguish between a genuine desire and an expectation imposed by someone else. It means recognising that wanting something different from the conventional picture of success does not make you a failure, and that the life you have is not necessarily inferior to the life you once imagined.

For Ruben, the freedom to accept himself has come gradually, through relationships that did not work out, conversations that challenged him and a creative process that required him to look at experiences he might otherwise have left unexplored. He is not claiming to have solved the puzzle of love. If anything, he seems more comfortable now with the fact that it cannot be solved.

Perhaps the most significant transformation in The Failed Romances is that the story has become less about finding the right person and more about understanding the person who is doing the searching. The Tamil films remain. So do the songs, the comedy, the romantic gestures and the spectacular misreadings that make the premise so entertaining. But the production now carries the weight of a more personal question: how much of ourselves are we willing to hide in the hope that somebody will love us?

Ruben’s willingness to share his history is not an invitation for the audience to judge his choices, nor is it a claim that his experiences represent everyone’s. His childhood, his relationship with language and culture, his years in theatre and his romantic disappointments belong to him. But the feelings underneath them, the desire to fit in, the fear of not being enough, the embarrassment of falling short of expectations, are recognisable far beyond his own life.

Cortese believes that this is where the work ultimately leads: not towards a universal recipe for romance, but towards a greater willingness to accept the uncertainty of being human. “We spend so much time trying to become the person we think we should be,” he says. “We want to be liked, we want to be successful, we want to be seen in a certain way. But sometimes we don’t fit that picture, and we have to trust that we’re enough. We have to allow someone to see us as we are.”

That is not an easy thing to do. It requires giving up some control over how other people perceive us, accepting that we cannot dictate the outcome of every relationship, and allowing ourselves to be vulnerable without knowing whether the other person will respond in the way we hope. It means recognising that rejection may hurt, that some relationships will end, and that not every experience will lead to the kind of resolution we might have wanted.

But there is also freedom in that uncertainty. If romance is a game whose rules are never entirely clear, perhaps failure is not always evidence that we have played it badly. Perhaps it can be an opportunity to learn something about ourselves, to question the assumptions we have carried, and to decide which parts of the script we want to keep.

For Ruben, the hope is that audiences will leave the theatre not with an answer to the question of how to find love, but with a little more permission to be themselves. The show’s humour makes that invitation easier to accept. Its music and spectacle give the stories room to soar. And its moments of vulnerability remind us that behind the most extravagant romantic gestures are ordinary people trying to make sense of what they want and who they are.

The failed romances remain failed romances. The past cannot be rewritten, and the future offers no guarantees. But perhaps that is not the point. What matters is whether we can stop treating every disappointment as a verdict on our worth, and begin to see our experiences, even the embarrassing ones, even the painful ones, as part of the life we are still learning to live.

The perfect romance may remain elusive. The perfect version of ourselves may never arrive. But there is a possibility that becomes available when we stop trying so hard to perform perfection: the chance to be seen, to be accepted, and to love without pretending to be someone else. And if we can learn to laugh at the stories we once thought were proof of our failure, perhaps we can begin to write the next chapter a little more honestly.

Featured photo courtesy of Esplanade – Theatres by the Bay

காதல் தோல்விகள் The Failed Romances plays on 2st and 22nd November 2026 at the Esplanade Recital Studio. Tickets available here

Kalaa Utsavam – Indian Festival of Arts 2026 runs from 20th to 29th November 2025 at Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay. Full lineup available here