After felicitating Arun Mukherjee, Satish Alekar and Ratan Thiyam this time, Nandikar’s Ninth National Theatre Festival commenced at the Academy of Fine Arts on December 5 with Pagla Ghoda in Marathi, an NCPA/Saarth production from Bombay. Amol Palekar claims to have “adapted” it, but it turned out to be more
Thanks to the organizational abilities of Nandipat, the fortnight-long Padma-Ganga Utsav sponsored by Charms Mini Kings brought to the western edge of the delta a broad cross-section of Bangladeshi theatre, cinema and music. Such cultural exchanges are necessary for a thorough comprehension of the state of the arts elsewhere, even
Nandikar’s National Theatre Festival became a major cultural victim of the sad events in the second week of December—a pity and a great irony, for it has prided itself in creating an artistes’ platform of integration and harmony among the divisive forces wreaking national havoc in recent years. The cancellation
If it could apply to the materialistic rat race of American society twenty years ago, why not the yuppy sector of India today? Neil Simon’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue, which satirized the cutthroat competitiveness of life in New York in 1972 and represented his more serious period of work,
Theatre Art of Bangalore is among the very few English-language theatre groups in India who care about doing serious plays. Not just that, their skilled abilities permit them to take on theatrically challenging scripts which ordinary groups normally avoid, such as Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus (presented by Sangit Kala Mandir, November
For Chetana to pick Brecht’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (Academy of Fine Arts, January 5) is at once both right and wrong. If translator-director Suman Mukherjee intends to convey Shakespeare, Brecht’s version is inadequate. But if he wants to convey Brecht, it becomes more problematic because we don’t know what
The Sangit Kala Mandir Festival of plays by Ank proved, if nothing else, that this Bombay group led by Dinesh Thakur has a very diverse range of dramatic interests as well as an enviable capability of putting on five different productions in a week’s time. Not too many established companies
The latest production of Class Theatre, Bārti Dām Deba Nā (Sisir Mancha, January 20), presents Dario Fo’s Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay! in a fairly straightforward Bengali translation by Sukumar Das, whose script captures much of Fo’s surface scurrility, if not the variety of his billingsgate. Das also keeps Fo’s topical
Shouvanik’s new play, Ekrāt Banalatā (Mukta Angan, January 23), is just that: a new play authored by Indrasish Laharry, who must at least be congratulated for persevering in composing original drama at a time when Bengali playwriting has virtually ground to a halt. This work, however, fades rapidly after a
Anamika Kala Sangam’s unique month-long Four Square Critics Choice Festival at Gyan Manch brings together for the first time in Calcutta a substantial number of current plays vetted by a panel of theatre critics. Reviewers may constantly carp about the decline in local theatre nowadays, but this festival empirically displays
Charbak’s newest presentation, Banjārā, continues their exemplary commitment to staging original drama created from within the group, instead of relying on the normal soft option of Bengali theatre—adapting foreign plays. However, Chandra Dastidar’s script this time shows little of the compositional strengths that made her Pratyāshā such a poignant success.
The art of mime has come a long, elastic way from Marcel Marceau, whose cute Chaplinesque manner became so ubiquitously influential that it could safely be called “classic” mime. But, as the cliche goes, a sea change has taken place in contemporary European mime, a good sample of which—the Theatre
