Rajkumar Hirani’s son to make stage debut from an iconic play

Mumbai : Ace filmmaker Rajkumar Hirani’s son Vir is set to make his acting debut with the play ‘Letters from Suresh’, an updated version of the iconic ‘Tumhari Amrita’, which had featured the late Farooq Sheikh and Shabana Azmi.

‘Letters from Suresh’, as in the case of the original, is being directed by theatre veteran Feroze Abbas Khan.

Vir Hirani is a recent graduate of the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, better known as RADA, in London. He has been making short films since his teens.

The epistolary production ‘Tumhari Amrita’ was an adaptation of A.R. Gurney’s American play ‘Love Letters’. The Hindi/Urdu version was written in 1992 by playwright Javed Siddiqui after Feroze Abbas Khan approached him following a meeting with Gurney.

The play premiered at the Prithvi Theatre in Mumbai on February 27, 1992, during the Jennifer Kapoor Festival as a tribute to the late actress on her birth anniversary.

With the play set to return, albeit in a new avatar, Vir will be seen putting his skills to test in view of the legacy of ‘Tumhari Amrita’ and the shoes of Farooq Shaikh that he steps into.

In the original, Farooq Shaikh and Shabana Azmi were the two actors who drove the play, which was based on an exchange of letters between the two protagonists separated by Partition.

Vir Hirani, incidentally, has a film to his credit. He made his directorial debut with ‘Return Gift’, which premiered at the 18th edition of the International Children’s Film Festival of India in Hyderabad.

The film, inspired by a true story narrated to Vir by his grandmother, and made along with his classmates, competed in the Little Directors category of the Festival.