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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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)
Samaresh Basu’s Prajāpati caused a sensation soon after publication in 1967, when it faced a lawsuit for obscenity, the courts ruling in favour of the prosecution and banning it. (I
Nandipat and director Prokash Bhattacharya lavish laborious care in every department of their latest production, which guarantees its success at the box office. The play, too, by Ujjwal Chattopadhyay, attempts
Bengali theatre has had limited engagement with Harold Pinter primarily because of his thematic sophistication and unconventional writing, which they believe their viewers cannot comprehend. On the few occasions they
