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Utpal Borjupari
NEW DELHI, MARCH 17: The first-ever All India Theatre Festival that opens in the Capital tomorrow will showcase the best of Indian theatre or the rang manch, including works of Rabindranath Tagore, Badal Sircar and Girish Karnad among others.
Organised by the National School of Drama (NSD), the month-long festival will see originals, interpretations and adaptations of creations of maestros like William Shakespeare, Rabindranath Tagore, Bertolt Brecht and Johann Goethe apart from the works of Vijay Tendulkar and Jaidev Hattangadi.
"The festival will witness the best available work of known senior and younger theatre people from all over India," says NSD director Ram Gopal Bajaj about the festival, the proposal for which was cleared by the Centre early last month.
Works of leading stage personalities like Amal Allana, Ratan Thiyam, Prasanna, Rudraprasad Sengupta, Rohini Hattangadi, Manohar Singh, Piyush Mishra and Ashish Vidyarthi will be on show at the `Bharat Rang Mahotsava '99'.
The festivalwill be inaugurated by Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi, to be followed by the staging of Girish Karnad's play Nagamandala (Hindi) under Amal Allana's directorial baton.
Among the major attractions of the festival are Calcutta-based Nandikar group's solo act Meghnad Badh Kavya (Bengali) written by Michael Madhusudan Dutta, Girish Karnad's Agni aur Barkha (Hindi) directed by Prasanna, Ajneya's Uttar Priyadarshi (Manipuri) directed by Ratan Thiyam and Himmat Mai (Hindi), an adaptation of Brecht's Mother Courage.
Essentially an all-Indian show, the festival will have one group from Tunisia giving a silent performance of Shakespeare's Othello, with only a few "sounds" in Arabic. It is being directed by Teofik Jebali.
"The festival, which NSD is organising for want of any such major stage event in the Capital, will also have attractions like Tagore's Chitra being performed in English by Mumbai's Ansh theatre and solo acts byRohini Hattangadi, Ashish Vidyarthi and Piyush Mishra," he says.
"The NSD selected the plays in consultation with experts and seniors from the field and has put together a fairly good collection, even though the Capital is known for its lack of an audience for theatre except for pass seekers", notes Bajaj.
The initial response to the Mahotsava "seems to be good", he added.
Says Rudraprasad Sengupta, "Such a festival was long overdue in the Capital... Even a small group like our Nandikar has been holding an annual theatre festival in Calcutta for the last 15 years."
"I am feeling very happy for the theatre community as, for a change, they will also get a substantial amount of money for the their performances," he says.
The festival, to be staged at the Kamani auditorium and the auditoria at NSD, will have plays in several Indian languages, including Tamil, Malayalam, Assamese, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Punjabi, Dogri and Bhojpuri.
Bollywood actor Ashish Vidyarthi will act in the NadiraBabbar-directed solo play Daya Shankar ki Diary (Hindi) while Rohini Hattangadi will act in her husband Jaidev Hattangadi's Aparajita. Sanjana Kapoor is in the cast of Rabindranath Tagore's Chitra (English).
Apart from Ratan Thiyam's Uttar Priyadarshi, which has been acclaimed the world over, the tiny but culturally vibrant Manipur will be represented by Awang Nonga Oklamgee Nawaa (Child of the North-East) of the Forum for Laboratory Theatres of Manipur.
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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