The growing interest in short (under an hour), intimate theatre is a positive sign: more traditional groups explore the advantages of small spaces, as I have advocated for years. The latest, Beadon Street Subham, has converted its rehearsal room in a lane behind Minerva Theatre into a well-equipped venue named the Rehearsal Blackbox, seating only 25 but allowing closeup theatrical proximity. The capacity could increase by three-sided viewing for even greater “0 distance”, as BSS calls it. For its new venture, it also moves from its Bengali fare to English, becoming another bilingual group.
Expanding on Liam O’Flaherty’s “The Sniper”, a 1923 anti-war short story prescribed by the ICSE board, BSS opens up an opportunity to offer to take its no-frills production to schools that even lack an auditorium, enabling the next generation to experience live interpretation of what they study and the art of theatre. For example, dramatizer-director Adhiraj Ghosh Dastidar’s casting of women as snipers (Ishita Debnath acts the eponymous part excellently) should prove an eye-opening gender-equal perspective.
Anamitra Khan’s double-decker set reduces the space constraints by layering vertically. The 20-strong team performs well and will improve further by perfecting the pronunciation and cultural, historical and military homework on the Irish Civil War that I have suggested to them—but they had already manufactured a fine sniping rifle with the right look!
Coincidentally, another English one-act script from the same time found its way to one of our oldest studio theatres, Padatik. Pendleton King’s Cocaine featured in the 1917 season of O’Neill’s pioneering off-Broadway Provincetown Players, and the relatively young group Stagephiles and debutante director Suchi Goenka put thought into their choice, because it is a very early play on cocaine addiction. Not too many revive it today, though its subject remains relevant, including in India.
Strikingly, though Goenka adapts it to Kolkata, she does not Indianize the American speech patterns. This creates an alienation effect whereby, as Brecht argues, we don’t get sucked into the emotions but push our minds to reflect on the social problem. She also cages the trapped lovers further by fitting Pranav Majumder’s box set of the rooftop room inside Padatik’s already limited space. With nothing to distract them, Yuvraj Surana and Shinjita Ghosh give powerful realistic performances relieved by a dance interlude, but Goenka must select less hackneyed songs for the soundscape.
N.B. to all theatre actors: in spite of the demands of both texts, neither cast indulges in onstage smoking—an object lesson to so many seniors who don’t care about the health hazards their puffing imposes on fellow thespians. Another desirable change that youth can teach their elders!
(27 June 2026)