Anya Theatre’s twin post-pandemic productions on our freedom fight have firmly established Debasish Ray as Bengali theatre’s newest dramatist-director to watch out for. He has worked with his own group,
The continuous tradition of Bengali public (not private) and commercial (not amateur) theatre began on 7 December 1872 with the staging of Nil-darpan by the National Theatre. To celebrate its
Another long-lived troupe celebrates its golden jubilee this year, more praiseworthy because smaller groups do not have the resources that established larger names can command, making it extremely difficult for
Anya Theatre has of late invited guest directors for its new productions: Debasish Ray, and now Arindam Mukherjee’s Topi. Mukherjee first wrote Topi in the late 1990s as a one-act,
With RRR now the highest form of entertainment, Raja Rammohun Roy’s sestercentennial came and went without the fanfare worthy of such a yugāvatār—not surprising, perhaps, in these historically revisionist times.
I went to Padatik not expecting much—the director of Kāgaz ke Gubbāre, Anubha Fatehpuria, had informed me that it comprised dramatized readings, as the first episode of their new series
It has been a long wait—for productions from the metros to visit Kolkata again. We thank Sanskriti Sagar for recommencing their well-curated invitations to acclaimed plays with Tansen, the debut
A partnership among the U S Consulate General, Theater Alliance (Washington, DC), Contact Base (Kolkata) and twenty participants from the U S, India, Bangladesh and Nepal facilitated a residency workshop
With students back physically in school, can young people’s theatre stay locked down? Two Bengali groups feature their welcome-back workshop-driven plays as part of a double bill, both directed by
Rangroop’s latest production, Spare Parts, begins like a social comedy but ends up as a political tragedy about India. One expects the latter trajectory from the writer, Swapnamoy Chakraborty, reminding
Ichheymoto’s new production is an unusual Marxism-made-easy-in-90-minutes capsule that dramatizes what many critics of Marx wished he had done—namely, lectured to the proletariat in their language about the ideas he
We have a prolific, experimental as well as versatile young partnership in Bengali theatre operating out of Barrackpore: playwright Anirban Sen and director Suvojit Bandopadhyay. Two of their new productions,
