The stage is set with a line of chairs. Lights dim. A violin strikes a background chord as actors walk in and take their seats. When the music dies, the action begins — not a fusillade of dialogue with actors pacing up and down the stage, making quiet entrances and dramatic exits, but a perfectly modulated reading from a book. Dramatised readings, common among theatre groups in the West, are becoming a regular feature in the Capital. Play aficionados might be a dying breed and the last book one might have opened by mistake must be a handed-down Shakespeare in university, but readings by theatre groups are strangely catching on.

Class Apart Productions and Yatrik read out from their new scripts this month at the India Habitat Centre, while in March Prospect Wide Aisle Theatre Concepts took the audience through two short plays by Woody Allen, Death Knocks and My Apology. And if you step into The Attic every second Thursday of a month, you can listen to readings by First City Theatre.

The audience sits back and let the story flow around them. It is something like listening to the radio except that dramatised readings incorporate an element of theatre. Kriti Pant of Prospect Wide Aisle says: “It is simple and entertaining. And for actors, book readings are easier than performing a play.” And they keep it short, to just about an hour, and often choose books with multiple characters because the audience will be spared the monotony of listening to one actor.

The readings also ensure that theatre groups stay in touch with their audience between productions. “We wanted to have a regular activity that would engage the audience,” says Neel Chaudhuri of First City Theatre. The group’s reading programme at The Attic is called Off The Mantle. “I had this image of unread books being dusted off the mantle,” smiles Chaudhuri. And it is not just plays. First City Theatre’s last reading was from the fantasy fiction of Neil Gaiman and the next one, towards the end of the month, will be from the autobiography of Bob Dylan.

But theatre groups mostly use reading sessions to test their new scripts. Yatrik introduced their forthcoming play Publish or Perish to the audience through a reading of the script. Bhaskar Ghose, Ramesh Thakur and Sabina Mehta Jaitly of Yatrik brought alive the twists and turns of Anuvab Pal’s script, highlighting its dark humour and irony. Class Apart did the same with Traitors, a script by Tripurari Sharma, a teacher at the NSD and visiting director of the group.

“I have had informal readings of all my plays at my home,” says Sharma. “Based on feedback, I make changes in the script before staging it. This time, I wanted the opinion of a larger audience.” Before the curtain rises on Traitors, produced by the Hungry Heart Festival, later this summer, Sharma will have made several changes. Theatre director Sohaila Kapur, who was part of the audience when Traitors was read, has suggested a few nips and tucks. “Too many lines, too many words,” she says. “The audience does not have a long attention span. They should get rid of the heavy dialogue.”

Often a dramatised reading is a performance in itself. First City Theatre had a live sarod performance during a reading of Simon Armitage’s Homer’s Odyssey. At other times there are recorded tracks punctuating scenes and sections. So are book readings — the art form that hangs between reading and theatre — here to stay? The Off the Mantle events have generated a regular following and other groups too have got an encouraging response. “I was very proud when people requested copies of the script to read at home,” says Sharma.