Haider

Because his plays are so globally ubiquitous, right? They offer this perfect baseline to see how deeply famous English roots can be planted into new hyper-local soil.

So we have to begin with director Vishal Barjwaj's legendary Shakespeare trilogy, which is Makpul, Onkara, and Haider.

Taking on Shakespeare is a monumental risk, precisely because the original texts are so culturally specific to Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

Right.

You aren't watching a classic play.

You are watching a localized tragedy unfold in real time.

And the idea of stripping away historical distance brings us perfectly to the final part of this trilogy, which is Haider, released in 2014 based on Hamlet.

We actually started the show by talking about this specifically, relocating the Prince of Denmark to 1995 Kashmir.