Dolls Theatre’s three-day International Puppet Theatre Festival featured mostly Indian troupes and one foreign participant, from Colombia, whose mixed-media work titled Rebirth I saw on the final evening. Based in Bangkok, Nicov Botelladearroz (nom de plume of Nicolas Bernal) presents a marionette who puts on a virtual-reality helmet to experience varied existences and nature’s diverse life forms, which we could relate to. However, two factors hampered full appreciation. First, the entirely Spanish dialogue required some kind of translation if not superscript or subtitling for our comprehension. Meanwhile, the visual beauty of his table-top puppetry got swallowed within Aban Mahal’s stage. The hosts should have found an intimate space to optimize his miniaturist aesthetics.
The two large-scale local productions suited the proscenium, but like Botelladearroz, lost out through inexplicable lighting from the wings, which tossed huge distracting shadows on both sides without balancing lights from top or front. Rong Berong Puppet Theatre’s Sidhel Kāthi, directed by Atish Mukherjee, tells the old parable of a burglar who unintentionally frees a wish-fulfilling genie but doesn’t know when to stop asking for boons. The problem with the story is that it does not deal sympathetically enough with the thief’s social deprivation, and instead stresses his wrongs.
Dolls Theatre’s The Archer Stood Alone relates the tale of Ekalavya and Drona in Hindi, no doubt meant for a national audience. Although conveying the casteist discrimination, director Sudip Gupta prefixes an elaborate purvaranga of Vyasa and Ganesha that consumes too much time, yet he significantly omits Krishna killing Ekalavya, who had later regained his archer’s prowess and posed a threat, as narrated in the Udyoga and Drona Parvas. Theatrically, Gupta constructs multiple levels that enhance a grander spectacle, and inserts some humorous byplay with Ganesha’s devoted rodents scurrying and worrying about the proceedings.
(7 September 2026)