Canonical drama receives rewritten treatment from two Bengali groups based outside Kolkata. Marking the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s passing, Kalyani Kalamandalam presents Macbeth Mirror, in which director Santanu Das whittles Dattatreya Datta’s translation of Macbeth into an Indianization featuring only the Witches, and applies on it the concept of worshipping the
The Sabhagar Theatre Festival laudably turned annual this year, and hosted three international shows. Monologuist Daniel Bye, brought by British Council, called his The Price of Everything a “performance lecture”, but left his Going Viral undefined. Novel nomenclature or not, both emerged as contemporary variations on the oldest human community
Mahadevi Birla World Academy joins the elite batch of enlightened schools who understand the educational value of a full-scale production. Their Lion King not only charmed packed halls but attained very high artistic standards comparable to musicals by professional companies (for example, those brought by the National School of Drama
Adaptations of classics accounted for most of the new productions from other parts of India at Nandikar’s 33rd National Theatre Festival. They included Shaw’s Pygmalion and Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in Hindi, from Delhi. Both compress their sources unwarrantedly, reducing the level of complexity, but relatively speaking, Flying Feathers
Hardly anyone writes drama on esoteric subjects in science, so it caused rare pleasure to view two plays based on physics that came to town. Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, a contemporary classic abroad, has had a decent Indian run in the production by Centre for Film and Drama (Bengaluru). Our city
Magic and the supernatural pervade two Bengali plays revived. Ekush Shatak goes back to one of Mohit Chattopadhyaya’s earliest, the poetic and elusive Nishād (1968), which one can interpret in various ways. It prophesies that the doctor protagonist will die twice and be reborn, his survival a third time depending
Bengali theatre has revived significant adaptations from the 1980s of two international classics dating to the mid-20th century: Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953) and Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit (1956). Both originally carried extraordinary political reverberations regarding the collective betrayal by a community of its own members. Audiences can judge for
Exchange visits at the national level by young groups enable us to view promising new acts that we normally do not get to see. Natak Company (Pune) and our Mad About Drama met at the Thespo Festival, Mumbai, and worked out a mutually beneficial arrangement whereby each hosts the other,
One rejoices when a group from a district town springs a surprise, exploding the unfair stereotype that nothing artistically inventive happens in the suburbs. Barasat Kalpik has made a mark in theatre circles with their shorter plays, including a visit to the Thespo festival in Mumbai; still, that did not
New initiatives to promote theatre nationally deserve unstinted applause, always, because experience tells us that these good intentions do not last beyond four or five years — for whatever reason, the organizers back out. The possibilities of qualifying under the central government’s Corporate Social Responsibility rules do not seem to
International Women’s Day triggers these musings. All-women plays transformed Western theatre in the 1970s and 1980s, rebelling against the conventional shortage of female roles, but Indian theatre never followed this important movement. Rangakarmee’s Saptaparni, featuring seven ladies directing seven solo actresses, marks a refreshing change, but the chance goes abegging
The inexcusable neglect of Indian classical literature in our education results, among other things, in a subsidiary neglect of Sanskrit drama by contemporary Indian theatre. The societal assumption is that these ancient texts have no relevance to our times. Tellingly, Bengali directors revive Greek and Roman tragedies with greater regularity
