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On 7 December 1872, the Bengali public (as opposed to amateur private) stage was born, when a theatre-mad group of young men in north Calcutta enacted Dinabandhu Mitra’s classic political protest drama, Nil-darpan, in a temporary hall without wings in the courtyard outhouse of Madhusudan Sanyal’s mansion (later famous as

In spite of the facts that Saoli Mitra directed fewer productions compared to other personalities and withdrew from the stage long before she should have, she left a lasting impact on Bengali theatre. I don’t wish to reiterate her apprenticeship under her legendary parents in Bohurupee and the already well-known

The departure of Swatilekha Sengupta comes as a major loss to Bengali theatre. This is not the stale cliché found in garden-variety wreaths, which focused exclusively on her acting, primarily in movies and only secondarily in theatre (which most obituarists don’t see). What those homages don’t reveal is that Kolkata’s

Covid took away another pillar of Kolkata’s Hindi theatre before his time. Viewers since the late 1980s have fond memories of Mahmud Alam’s jovial onstage and offstage personae, mostly with Padatik, and in the recent past with Janus, the Centre for Visual and Performing Arts that he built with his

Everything about Soumitra Chatterjee’s cinematic career has received closeup focus in the myriad articles published since his final exit, but hardly anyone has spotlighted his theatre activities. He remembered fondly his childhood days in Krishnanagar (Nadia, Bengal) where his grandfather and father used to take part in amateur theatre. One

Private auditoriums in Kolkata have reopened at last, following the standard operating procedures advised by health authorities. On October 1, Aneek staged Pirandello o Puppeteer (already reviewed here) at Tapan Theatre. On October 15, the Academy of Fine Arts auditorium reopens with Theatre Formation Paribartak’s Ekti Uttaradhunik Samajik Pala directed

  The new Bengali production by the young group Ichchhemato, Ghum Nei, won four of the fourteen awards presented at the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards this year, in META’s first-ever online ceremony last night. They won for Best Male Supporting Actor (Koushik Kar), Best Costume Design (Turna Das and

COVID-19 has decimated the finances of innumerable theatre technicians, actors and support staff who work as daily wage earners, and used to get paid after each performance. Since all auditoria have been locked for the last five months, their source of income has closed. Many Bengali group-theatre artists have got