Among the Bengali productions brought to a standstill by Covid are two entertaining comedies by leading purveyors of the genre. Both deal with the impact of new technology on married life. Durgadas Smrity Sangha’s Biswās Kari Nā features the comic duo of Kamal Chattopadhyay (also the director) and Nandini Bhowmik
The rising intolerance toward religious minorities in India has become a matter of grave concern not just within the country but also internationally. In the Christmas season, we must appreciate two recent Bengali productions against that background. Both have Christian protagonists who do good for their local rural residents. I
As the auditoriums gradually reopened this year, Bengali groups began to revive their productions that had remained suspended since March 2020. Garia Krishti’s Kālpurush presents the eponymous third novel of Samares Mazumdar’s acclaimed political tetralogy. In it, he showed the Left Front’s decline into corruption and intimidation during the 1980s,
Nandikar’s 32nd National Festival saw a marked increase in local participation by Bengali groups: 13 of the 22 shows on display. Budgetary constraints forced the reduction of visiting troupes, which ultimately affects our young theatre-lovers, denied the wide exposure to Indian theatre that earlier editions used to provide the previous
Among the new shows from outside that visited Nandikar’s National Theatre Festival, Wings Theatre’s Helen heralded a young Assamese group that we should look out for in future. Led by the 22-year-old writer-actress-director Kismat Bano, whom we have seen previously in the work of Seagull (Guwahati), they chose a difficult
The year-old Rabindra Bharati Theatre Repertory has come into its own with Phāgun Rāter Gappo, from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Soumitra Basu’s new translation does not distort the source while reinventing it yet retaining the characters’ names, and Tarun Pradhan’s direction indigenizes it into a quasi-native ethos of rustic humans
For the second year running, Happenings commissioned youth and university theatre from all over south Asia to join its Rabindra Utsav. I cannot recall any festival in Kolkata with participation from both Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, so we must applaud the organizers for this feat, while blaming Kolkatans for not
With unerring perspicacity over the last few years, Dwijen Bandyopadhyay of Samstab has selected works that comment on our sociopolitical conditions, often from foreign sources. He has done it again, in the centenary of Kafka’s writing The Trial, persuading Tirthankar Chanda to dramatize the novel, which has taken the form
Desire and the tragedies that result from indulging it, and equally from repressing it, formed the theme of two early 20th-century classics that revisited local theatre after a decade. Ha-ja-ba-ra-la, from Chakdaha, celebrates its 55th anniversary with a Bengali adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire under the Elms, while The Creative
For a consummate actor like Ustad Naseeruddin Shah, Motley’s solo Einstein should not have caused great pains in the preparation. Let me take the musical analogy of Ustadship further. In Hindustani classical, it does not extend an Ustad much to play a raga for under an hour; his true mettle
Nandikar’s extramural programme rolls on at full pace. They have joined a select few in Bengali and English theatre to work in correctional institutions and present public productions of these therapeutic activities. Sessions at the Dum Dum Central Correctional Home led to Bhālomānush, derived from Brecht’s Good Person of Setzuan.
This week’s column looks at new biodramas on two neglected figures in Bengal’s history, but at the outset we pay respect to a man who preferred to remain unlit in the wings, labouring indefatigably behind the scenes for the cause of Bengali theatre. Suvasish Mukherjee, the backbone of Rangroop, which
