July 2021

Adaptations of classics accounted for most of the new productions from other parts of India at Nandikar’s 33rd National Theatre Festival. They included Shaw’s Pygmalion and Osborne’s Look Back in […]

Hardly anyone writes drama on esoteric subjects in science, so it caused rare pleasure to view two plays based on physics that came to town. Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, a contemporary

Magic and the supernatural pervade two Bengali plays revived. Ekush Shatak goes back to one of Mohit Chattopadhyaya’s earliest, the poetic and elusive Nishād (1968), which one can interpret in

Bengali theatre has revived significant adaptations from the 1980s of two international classics dating to the mid-20th century: Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953) and Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit (1956). Both

Exchange visits at the national level by young groups enable us to view promising new acts that we normally do not get to see. Natak Company (Pune) and our Mad

One rejoices when a group from a district town springs a surprise, exploding the unfair stereotype that nothing artistically inventive happens in the suburbs. Barasat Kalpik has made a mark

New initiatives to promote theatre nationally deserve unstinted applause, always, because experience tells us that these good intentions do not last beyond four or five years — for whatever reason,

International Women’s Day triggers these musings. All-women plays transformed Western theatre in the 1970s and 1980s, rebelling against the conventional shortage of female roles, but Indian theatre never followed this

The inexcusable neglect of Indian classical literature in our education results, among other things, in a subsidiary neglect of Sanskrit drama by contemporary Indian theatre. The societal assumption is that

News about a couple of nationally successful productions preceded their arrival last weekend. Yugpurush: Mahatma na Mahatma celebrated its 300th (not a misprint) show — counting all three versions in

Disability representation has had trailblazing exponents in Kolkata theatre history, and new productions follow in their wake. The standard approach involves a regular troupe depicting the story of a differently-abled

British genres of stage entertainment drive the new productions of two recently-formed city groups led by veterans. After debuting with Joe Orton’s subversive bedroom comedy What the Butler Saw, Dramatics