Baghajatin Alaap continued its initiative of the Kolkata International Bengali Theatre Festival for the second year with a three-day edition featuring four foreign groups from as far apart as the US and the Antipodes. This platform laudably brings diasporic productions back to the homeland, as well as allows them to measure their standards compared to the best in Bengali theatre running in the city. But based on the two full-length plays in the quartet, these standards need to improve quite a bit to catch up with the levels in Kolkata.
Epic Actors’ Workshop (New Jersey), regular visitors here, brought No Man’s Land, dramatized by Golam Sarwar Harun from a short story by Mojaffar Hossain of Bangladesh. Recalling “Toba Tek Singh”, an injured destitute takes shelter on a riverine island on the India–Bangladesh border, causing consternation in security forces on both sides and sensation for villagers who throng to turn the scene into a carnival atmosphere, but no one comes to her rescue. The script rather simplistically depicts the two populations as Hindu and Muslim respectively, while directors Harun and Gargi Mukherjee alternate sequences and blocking too schematically. I note that they remain inattentive to military details like in last year’s Nirastra, executing about-turns to the left instead of the right.
After the opening ceremony, Emirates Bengal Natyagoshthi (Dubai) staged Ujjwal Chattopadhyay’s Prahasan, without acknowledging its source, the British film Exam (2009), in which a company holds a test to select the right candidate for a position of responsibility, involving a cure that it has manufactured for a killer virus. The movie, not particularly memorable, is still more sinister than Chattopadhyay’s self-declared farce, which also predictably demonizes the undeniably capitalist motives of corporations. Kalyan Bhattacharya directs the cast of applicants most unbelievably, for total strangers venting cuss words and language in bad taste during an employment opportunity destroys any semblance of the illusion of reality.
(7 February 2026)