A struggling actor meets a personified version of Mumbai at an audition. They flirt, and glimpses of how the city changed during the lockdowns spill out. A Gujarati woman rewrites the rules of business when she seizes the pandemic as an opportunity to kick off a mask business. A girl discovers the true colours of her family while being locked in at home with them. These are stories new and old, lived and heard that Akvarious Productions is stringing together for their new show, Covid Or Without You: A Lockdown Revue.

The production features actors Adhaar Khurana, Avantika Ganguly, Chaitnya Sharma, Kashin Shetty, Keith Sequeira, Lisha Bajaj, Muzammil Qureshi, Rohini Ramnathan and Sarthak Kakar, “provided they test negative”, director Akarsh Khurana asserts. The show is a collection of multiple pieces that the actors performed online through an Instagram page called Akvarious Live during the lockdown. Spanning between six and 12 minutes each, the stories have now been adapted for the stage, woven together with choreography and music. But what happens when any of the actors test positive? “As each actor is performing a different piece, in case someone tests positive, we can work around it,” Akarsh assures us.