Abdus Selim

With the slogan, Aai Natoker Ongone, seven new plays, written by young playwrights and directed by young directors, were staged throughout Nagorik Natya Sampradaya’s Notuner Utshab 2019 at Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, from November 29 to December 5.

Chronicling Bangladesh Theatre and Liberation War Plays inevitably persuades one to explore how proscenium theatre culture came in this subcontinent, especially in this part of India, that is Bengal, for, contrasted with our open-stage Jatra that does not divide the audience from the performers, a proscenium stage is the “arch or opening separating the stage from the auditorium together with the area immediately in front of the arch”. This Greek tradition came to India sometimes in the mid-18th century and obviously it is a colonial cultural legacy.

Pir (variant spelling: Peer) is purely a subcontinent concept that has etymological root in Persian language. In English, the word can be translated into saint or more specifically, holy man.

More than once I have written in this column that Bangla theatre lacks musicals though we have a reasonably long tradition of dance-drama introduced by Rabindranath Thakur.

I am not talking about any common shouts of applause that we often come across in any political meet or in any mesmerizing performance by a performing maestro—it's the youth I am talking

When we think of Beckett's theatre, the images that come to mind are bodies in pain, immobilised, paralysed, trapped or incomplete, observed William McEvoy in an online

Luigi Pirandello is not a very familiar name among our mainstream theater practitioners, for as far as my memory goes, none of his plays have been translated and staged in Bangladesh so far.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his A Defence of Poetry, written in 1821, most famously declared poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Merry Christmas (belated though!), and a very happy new year to all! I finished my year (2018) with a polemical trip to Shantiniketan Pouhsmela—my first ever.

In one of my recent write ups in this column I made a promise (perhaps more to myself than to my readers) to translate Man of La Mancha, a very successful Broadway musical production of the present time.

At the very outset let me spell out what I mean by English plays. By the phrase I do not mean plays written by English playwrights in English language nor do I mean Bangla translations of English plays performed in Dhaka city. What I mean is: plays written and performed in English language in Dhaka city – beginning from the British rule until now.

Muktijudhdho(Liberation War), like innumerable Bangladeshis, is a revelation of amour to me. At the very outset I have a plain confession to make—I am not a certified Freedom Fighter.

Call it serendipitous (Indian English has coined a word with similar connotation coaccident in its Bollywood movies) if you wish, in recent months I had the rare stroke of luck watching three interviews of Ian McKellen

Yes, I am talking about Mahasthan, a play written by Dr Selim Mozahar (apologies for not being sure about the English spelling he prefers), visualized

Being homeless is perhaps the most cursed life a human being can lead. In spite of the high sounding human rights moralism propagated by big powers and human rights watchdogs, numerous homeless people are constantly being humiliated, harassed and even traded by the power mongering vicious circles globally.

From my real life experience I have learned, and that too has been a real hard learning, that fraternizing with celebrities initiates a lot of mortifying situations.

Bangla translation of Bertolt Brecht's Life of Galileo was staged almost two score and eight years back by Nagorik Natya Somprodaya and it immediately created tremendous vibes in the theater arena of Bangladesh, and of course there were multiple reasons for that.

His plan was to produce the play as a multi-group production funded by Goethe Institute, Dhaka but it somehow did not work that way. The gentleman left Bangladesh with huge frustration.

Paulo Coelho in a note on his 1987-Novel The Alchemist, wrote—before the novel was translated from Portuguese to English—that he one day received a letter from HarperCollins that read, 'reading The Alchemist was like getting up at dawn and seeing the sun rise while the rest of the world still slept.

Perhaps her name was Cynthia Warren, an American expatriate English language teacher at Dhaka University Institute of Modern Languages, around late seventies or early eighties of the last millennium.