CEO by day, actor by weekend: Auckland exec's double life takes centre stage
Rishabh Kapoor with fellow actors Nikita Varma (left) and Karishma Grebneff. (Supplied photo)
Aucklander Rishabh Kapoor has put his actor’s hat on as Prayas Theatre prepares to open its new absurd comedy, Mama Moo.
Rishabh Kapoor spends his working week running an Auckland real estate company. Come the weekend, the boardroom gives way to rehearsals, scripts and the stage.
For the past three months, the Indian-born chief executive of Impression Real Estate has been spending five to six hours on Saturdays and Sundays rehearsing for Mama Moo, a new dark comedy opening at TAPAC this month.
Kapoor plays Siddhant, a widowed abattoir manager who falls for Sara, a committed animal-rights activist. His already complicated love life becomes stranger when the ghost of a cow he has slaughtered returns and offers to help him win Sara over, provided he saves her calf.
There is also Siddhant’s dead wife, a manifestation of his darker side, animal-rights protests, courtroom trouble, a psychiatric diagnosis and a hostage situation involving a pet dog named Lola.
The absurdist comedy, written by Auckland-based Indian novelist and screenwriter Nimish Tanna and directed by Margaret-Mary Hollins, runs at TAPAC from September 21 to 26.
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Theatre is hardly Kapoor’s only pursuit outside the office.
Originally from Lucknow, he is also a trainee pilot, plays cricket and can play more than 10 percussion instruments. But acting itself is no weekend experiment.
Kapoor has more than 15 years of experience across theatre, film and television and has appeared in more than 30 stage productions. He also serves as executive director of Prayas Theatre, the volunteer-led South Asian theatre company behind Mama Moo.
His unusual working week is also fairly representative of how Prayas operates.
“Most of us in the production have day jobs,” Kapoor told Awaaz.
Unlike a commercial theatre company that can rehearse through the working week, Prayas has to build its productions around the lives of its largely volunteer cast and crew.
“A lot of people are working full-time, so we cannot do rehearsals during the week like any commercial company would do,” Kapoor said.
“So we do Saturday, Sundays, five to six hours, and we have a three-month lead period.”
Those weekends are now leading towards a short six-day season in Auckland.
For Kapoor, Mama Moo also marks a change of pace for Prayas.
The company has spent more than two decades putting South Asian stories on Auckland stages, often tackling heavier themes around identity, migration and belonging.
Kapoor says Mama Moo is not an outright departure from that history, but it is deliberately lighter.
“For our audiences that have seen us over the past 20 years, it’s a different show,” he said.
“They’ve seen us telling stories which have those kind of messaging or they have heavy topics or they go through some more heavier emotions in life. We’re trying to lighten it up a little bit.”
Kapoor says it is the first time Prayas has taken on a full-length absurd comedy.
But beneath the ghosts and increasingly improbable situations is a contemporary story he believes will still feel familiar to people living in Auckland today.
Siddhant’s Indian background is part of the character, but his life is not built around the conventional immigrant narrative of arriving in New Zealand and struggling to find a place here.
“It’s not a cliché immigration story or it is not a cliché social problem story that you have seen and we’ve heard so many times,” Kapoor said.
Instead, he describes Siddhant as someone who is simply “already part of the ecosystem”.
“It doesn’t say you’ve been through struggles, it doesn’t say, you know, a story of an immigrant. It is a story of a person who’s already part of this journey.”
There are parts of Siddhant that Kapoor recognises from his own life in New Zealand.
“There are a lot of similarities in the conversation that he has during the storytelling that I have in my life being in New Zealand,” he said.
That contemporary setting also reflects how Prayas itself has evolved.
The not-for-profit theatre group was founded more than two decades ago to create a space for South Asian stories and performers, telling stories from the subcontinent predominantly in English and making them accessible to audiences in New Zealand.
“One of the biggest reasons why we were created is to promote our stories and to promote it through the people who are part of this community,” Kapoor said.
Earlier productions have approached that mission much more directly.
Kapoor points to Swabhoomi: Borrowed Earth, a Prayas production that traced about 150 years of South Asian presence in New Zealand, from the earliest arrivals through to the contemporary community.
Mama Moo begins from a different place.
“It is very current,” Kapoor said.
“It is, you know, how we have integrated into New Zealand and now New Zealand has vice versa integrated into us.”
That is reflected in the people putting the production together too. The 13-strong cast and wider creative team include people from different backgrounds, while Hollins brings experience across organisations including Massive Theatre, Red Leap, MIXIT, Auckland Theatre Company and Silo Theatre.
For all that could potentially be read into the production, Kapoor is reluctant to prescribe a message for audiences.
“I don’t think intentionally we are trying to project a social message,” he said.
“If people want to pick up a social message, it’s their choice.”
For him, it is fundamentally a story about two people with radically different outlooks trying to navigate their way through love.
And for Kapoor, getting that story onto the stage has meant fitting another life around the one he already has.
