Let’s look at Minerva’s National Theatre Festival 2026 statistically. It brought ten of the seventeen invitees from outside Bengal—a creditable majority, hypothetically allowing audiences to watch a number of external
To my pleasant surprise, the National Theatre Festival 2026 organized by Minerva Natya Sanskriti Charcha Kendra, criticized by me for its arbitrary selection in past years, exhibited some thoughtful curating
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
