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
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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
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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
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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
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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
EXCESS ESTROGEN | HOME IN A SUITCASE
Akvarious’ new production, Excess Estrogen, comprises seven ten-minute sketches about women written within the group, directed collectively and enacted exclusively by women. The form of serious playlets presented entertainingly harks
PANJARE DANRER SHABDA | GAME CHANGER | TIKI-TAKA
Sports in India have become the subject of several plays in recent times, creating a subset of original drama for study. Worthy precedents in Bengali include Theatre Workshop’s Bāish Gajer
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RADHA-RAMAKRISHNA
Santanu Das, director of Kalyani Kalamandalam’s Radha-Ramakrishna, has surpassed all his previous work with the group on their 30th anniversary. Simultaneously, the author, Rakesh Ghosh, has outdone the plethora of
CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG | HIBIJIBI BAHINI
It is heartening and heartwarming to see large-scale theatre-in-education in good hands committed to sowing the seeds of the art form in children. The latest school to invest (literally, too)