Sayak resuscitated their competitive festival of Bengali plays this year, last held in 2018, and featured ten productions selected by Debasis Majumdar on the basis of their scripts. As a
Ichheymoto’s two productions from 2023 present established texts of Bengali literature, Turna Das’s visualization of Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s Birānganā Kābya making a striking contribution to all-women Bengali theatre, reminding us
Atelier’s Campus Theatre Festival saw two Delhi colleges come to Kolkata in its 14th annual season—no small achievement for Atelier, who this year even faced intimidation and an attack on
After entertaining on Bengali big screens, ghostly comedies have come to haunt Bengali theatre, many halls of which already provide homes to resident spooks. While most productions of the current
Narayan Sanyal’s books have powered two new dramatizations, both by playwrights with a serious bent, befitting Sanyal’s deeper (as opposed to popular) writing. Spectators who bemoan an absence of inspiring
The most phenomenal designers of present-day non-proscenium theatre in Kolkata both significantly come from outside the city: Debasish Ray in Khardah and Suvojit Bandopadhyay in Dankuni. I say this because
It pleased me no end to discover the work of the young Anil Alessandro, who spends half the year with his father (Abani Biswas)’s group Theatre House near Santiniketan, and
Mahmood Farooqui from Delhi made a welcome return to Kolkata after over a decade, at the invitation of Kolkata Centre for Creativity, to present his Dastangoi Collective’s Dastan-e-Karn az Mahabharata.
Among festival favourites over the past year, I have not yet reviewed Angik’s Binodini Opera and Mukhomukhi’s Ājker Shājāhān. Both respect their sources, but we need to look at them
In perhaps the first visit by a Finnish theatre troupe to Kolkata, the trio of Essi Rossi (director), Johannes Holopainen (actor) and Pauli Riikonen (designer) honoured our city with the
The 13th edition of Little Thespian’s National Theatre Festival, now named Jashn-e-Azhar, brought participating groups from Mumbai, Delhi, Varanasi and Ujjain. Tripurari Sharma’s Rup Arup under Unicorn (Delhi) had visited
Author-director Sudipta Bhawmik has earned a respected position in Bengali theatre circles for his original plays, invariably thought-provoking and often innovatively constructed. On Janmāntar, which his New Jersey group ECTA
