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 productions when Kolkata is generally denied such opportunities. However, in actual terms this is a flawed ratio because, as I have criticized before, the simultaneous scheduling at different auditoriums means that this year, one could realistically see a maximum of eight, plus the host’s own inaugural play. Besides, of the above-mentioned ten, six came from Maharashtra, two from Assam, and one each from Manipur and Tripura: a somewhat skewed national picture (nothing from the north or south).
I have already reviewed a praiseworthy Maharashtra trio; now I turn to a lukewarm pair from the far eastern states. Inspired by Shakespeare’s Othello, dramatist-director Sanjoy Kar of Natyabhumi (Agartala) sets his colourful costume drama Rangin Rumāl during the Mughal incursion into Tripura ruled by Maharaja Govinda Manikya. Kar converts Othello into a lower-caste fisherman Atul, whose valiant leadership of his soldiers repels the invaders. But Kar compresses Shakespeare far too much, to under two hours. His vibrant indigenous songs and dances captivate our eyes and ears but eat further into the Bengali text, not leaving sufficient scope for the actors to really prove themselves.
In Abhigyanm (Guwahati)’s A Stupid Common Man, dramatist-director Ranhang Choudhury constructs an equally colourful performance on the concept of a clown show with circus apparatus as their props. Against a backcloth of a snakes-and-ladders board, his team of undoubtedly talented male and female clowns depicts the circuitous life cycle of an everyman Indian citizen as they cycle around, improvise acrobatics and demonstrate biomechanically how absurd human life has become in our social and political circumstances. The trilingual script in Assamese, Hindi and English achieves a national outreach, but the protracted length undermines its impact, the opposite process of Rangin Rumāl but with a similar unsatisfying end result.
(14 February 2026)