July 2021

While Western playwrights do not attempt to dramatize the ancient Greek epics in their entirety, Indians have not felt so intimidated by the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyana as to avoid staging […]

Reduced to a number that one can virtually count on the fingers of one hand, Hindi groups in this city battle the difficult conditions of having to rely on largely

Comic adaptation in Bengali theatre must tread carefully not to counter its source’s objective. Chandan Sen based Sayak’s Premkathā on Moliere’s classic The Miser, but in content and form it

Swapna-sandhani celebrates their silver jubilee this year — a milestone for an initially small band of youngsters, who pursued their commitment to autonomy by discovering off-the-beaten-track venues to break out

English theatre in the city lost one of its dedicated practitioners when Rohit Pombra passed away suddenly and prematurely. He had helmed his group, Stagecraft, for 30 years, guiding them

Intimate theatre at its most intense involves the use of small spaces as well as scripts for no more than two actors. The minimalism demanded by this kind of drama

When Sartre reinterpreted the Orestes myth for his first major play, The Flies, in 1943, while working with the French Resistance against the German occupation, everyone took it as a

Cross-dressing has found its safest shelter in theatre, across time and space, often forcing audiences to interrogate gender stereotypes. So when two recent productions flaunted it, we applauded their gusto,

Three big-ticket productions on national tours all converted their prose sources into lightweight theatre. Prime Time’s Salaam, Noni Appa, dramatized by Adhir Bhatt from Twinkle Khanna’s story, included two entirely

Little Thespian’s national festival, Jashn-e-Rang, turned international in its seventh edition, incorporating the welcome surprise of music and dance from the Indian diaspora in Mauritius. It also continued its practice

Under the visionary principal John Mason, St James’ School pioneered full-scale musicals involving pupils in Kolkata almost 30 years ago, proving the huge pedagogical benefits of educational theatre. Other institutions

How does one perform madness? Distort the “normal”, cultivate an aberration, contort and grimace? Or make no change from a “stable” characterization, but let the words do the exposing? Adaptations