KHEYECHISH? | NOTHING LIKE PERSEPOLIS
The Urban Theatre Project TUTP), now just over a year old, has become a nucleus for solo or minimalistic performance in a studio setting, serving both local and touring productions.
Reviews
ITEM | SEASONS OF LOVE
Kolkata’s most up-and-coming English-language dramatist (admittedly within a minuscule pool), Ahon Gooptu, reiterated two of his earlier works in December-January. The first, Item, had inaugurated The Urban Theatre Project in
MEGHNAD | PAUL O VINCENT
The strongest Bengali-language American dramatist, Sudipta Bhawmik, had two plays on the Kolkata stage this season, both biographical. Natya-Anan’s Meghnad (at Nandikar’s National Festival) presents the first literary expression of
Reviews
BHASA-BHARATAM | DRISHTIKANYA
Two productions from outside Kolkata came to festivals held in December. Nandikar’s National Theatre Festival hosted the National School of Drama Repertory Company (Sikkim)’s Bhāsa-bhāratam, an unprecedented concept. At director
PHERARI PHAUJ | BHANU | FRANKENSTEIN
Nandikar’s 42nd National Theatre Festival began with several ambitious Bengali adaptations and interpretations that I had not yet seen. Of them, the most notable is Naihati Natya Samanway Samity’s Pherāri
Reviews
DASTAN-E-RET-SAMADHI | SANP SIRHI | MANS | PIYAKKAD
This year’s laudably-expanded Ami Arts Festival organized by Kolkata Centre for Creativity brought a clutch of Hindi–Urdu theatre productions from Mumbai and Delhi, minus one thanks to the Indigo fiasco.
DIDN’T KNOW THAT ABOUT YOU | DREAMGIRL | HANDLE WITH CARE
The three European productions hosted by The Urban Theatre Project in November should have targeted much more proactively a teenage audience or even younger (in the case of Handle with
Reviews
MEANWHILE ELSEWHERE | KAUMUDI | THE NIGHTS
Much anticipated, Sanskriti Sagar’s resurrected Sabhagar Theatre Festival delighted Kolkata audiences starved of platforms featuring mainstage productions from outside. Three of them shared an unusual trait of surreal, nonlinear, loosely-linked
Reviews
RAKTA-KARABI
The definitive directorial interpretations of Tagore’s modernist classic in the last 20 years have been Suman Mukhopadhyay’s for Tritiya Sutra and Pradip Bhattacharya’s for the Baharampur unit of West Bengal
Reviews
APARAJITA
Celebrating its ruby jubilee, Anya Theatre does not rest on its former laurels but, admirably, notches up its third consecutive 4-star production over the last couple of years. The invited
HE SINDHUSARAS
Rangapat blew a golden chance to explain to unaware Bengali audiences the source and evolution of the now global techniques of realistic acting formulated by Konstantin Stanislavsky. The author, Ujjwal
MARX IN KOLKATA
Invited by Sanskriti Sagar, venue hosts of Swapna-sandhani’s Marx in Kolkata, I looked forward to the much-publicized play, the first in English by this Bengali group. Press features about it