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
Almost as if timed for election season, two plays sourced from Malayalam and Bengali stories respectively focus on the creation of political figures. Both follow similar upswings in the fortunes of two less-than-ordinary men catapulted to power ludicrously by things over which they had no control. Both recall Brecht’s depiction
The trio of recent big-ticket imports from Mumbai gave us a variety of original drama, but none fully satisfying. Mahesh Dattani’s latest work, Gauhar by the Primetime Theatre Company, the most eagerly awaited of them, also was so outrageously overpriced that it effectively excluded genuine aficionados of music and theatre
The Narada (from ancient myth, not nascent media) of Kolkata theatre, Vinay Sharma, follows the footsteps of the sage who used to interrogate the gods with awkward questions that none could answer. He does this twice in quick succession, on two new plays written and directed by him, produced by
