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 untrained actors. Although the directors themselves have considerable resumes in theatre, they cannot raise the levels of their proteges by
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 deviates from the original. The legendary French director Jean-Louis Barrault stated that the most tragic French plays are the most
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 of the perceived Bengali theatre circuit, and then, despite alignment with the political change that occurred in 2011, had the
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 from the usual fare of foreign drama to a growing enthusiasm for original Indian playwriting in English, and branching out
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 finds few takers among Bengali groups, which depend on conventional-sized auditoriums and audiences as their constituency. Of course, the paucity
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 clarion to fight the Nazis. When Pancham Vaidic revives it in Bengali as Māchhi, we must read 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, but when they didn’t think things through, we moaned the lost opportunities. From Mumbai, Patchworks Ensemble’s Gentlemen’s Club AKA Tape
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 redundant characters – the daughter and handyman – and a third, the sister, employed merely for laughs. Lillete Dubey should
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 of play readings as curtain-raisers before the main event nearly every evening. Its choice of productions, too, moved out of
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 then emulated them, starting a movement whose members stood much above all others belonging to the run-of-the-assembly-line schooling system. Having
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 of two non-dramatic European texts last week explored such challenging personae. Living Pictures (Wales) produced Gogol’s path-breaking tale, Diary of
Bengali theatre has developed a profound nostalgia for its rural forefathers – at once desirable to acquaint the new generation with its history, and disagreeable for the uncritical romanticism with which it glorifies the past. Shabdamugdha Natyakendra does a great service by dramatizing Syed Mustafa Siraj’s autobiographical novel Māyā Mridanga,
