Article - Shakespeare in Bangla Natya: The Tempest of ‘Dhaka Theatre’

Published in: "Yearly Shakespeare" (ISSN 0976-9536)
Volume No.: 14
Pages: 70-74
Year of Publication: 2016
Published by: Sri Aurobindo Study Centre, Santiniketan
Edited by: Prof. Goutam Ghoshal, Professor, Deptt. of English, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan

Shakespeare in Bangla Natya: The Tempest of ‘Dhaka Theatre’

Bivash Bishnu Chowdhury

Written at a time when Britain had barely begun to embark on its colonial age, “The Tempest” ends with the exiled Duke Prospero choosing to end his rule over the natives of some distant isle and offer them their freedom. It is this strikingly modern message of power-sharing and toleration that the Dhaka Theatre’s production of the play brings home to Shakespeare’s Globe, the reconstruction of the famous open air theatre in London where the play was first performed 401 years ago (John Farndon).

In the time of British rule in India and later, we have seen that “Shakespeare is the most translated or adapted foreign playwright in Bengali. In an interview, the veteran Theatre director Utpal Dutta has said that there are minimum 500 books of the translated or adapted version of Shakespeare. …And of course, most of them were translated for performance” (Subir Roy Chowdhury & Majumder 59; translated). In 1964, the year of the 400^th birth anniversary of William Shakespeare, a translation of The Tempest was staged by ‘Amateur Unit’ on 30^th May 1964 in Kolkata (the capital of West Bengal, India). 

In Bangladesh, The Tempest (Dhaka Theatre’s version) was adapted by Rubayet Ahmed and directed by the theatre personality Nasiruddin Yousuff. In 2012, on the occasion of the Summer Olympics in London there was a six week international theatre festival that started from 21^st April. And this production (The Tempest) of ‘Dhaka Theatre’ was performed at ‘Globe Theatre’, London on 7^th and 8^th May of 2012. This was the first time in the history of the Olympics that a theatre festival was organized as part of it. The ‘Royal Shakespeare Company’ played a main role to organize this event called ‘Globe to Globe’ theatre festival.

This paper is not a review of that production but rather an overview of ‘Dhaka Theatre’s’ The Tempest through the lens of Bangla Natya. So, before entering into the discussion on this topic we need to clarify first what is Bangla Natya. Here, we shall consider Bangla Natya as that kind of drama which uses indigenous Bengali performance traditions, and not merely the Bengali language. So, now the question comes how do traditional Bengali performances look like. In short, it is a where one or many Gayen (chiefly meaning ‘Singing-Actor’ who performs the drama through a song-based narrative) perform in the whole play through the process of ‘Story Telling’. Very rarely are they engaged in doing ‘Character Acting’. The entire play moves through song, narration and dance (mainly choreographical performances). In a personal conversation with the director, he said that ‘Staging of a Shakespeare play is very difficult. But…to produce Shakespeare’s play on stage in Bengali one need not follow the Elizabethan style.’ The production of a play depends on the director, and the socio-cultural conditions of its production and reception. Shakespeare had written his text and productions of these were done according to his culture and custom. So, when we do a Shakespearean production for our Bengali audiences, we also need to use our own traditions. Without make the transformation of the text from Shakespeare’s five-act structure to the fluidity of the Bengali folk narrative form, the performance will never happen, especially in the mode of Bangla Natya.

To know about ‘Shakespeare in Bengal’, it is perhaps necessary to go back to the Bengal of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Ranging from Girishchandra Ghosh to Utpal Dutta, “it was so tough to memorize the name of the actors who didn’t perform in Shakespeare plays, in English language or in Bengali. There was only one exception, Sombhu Mitra” (Roy Chowdhury & Majumder 60; translated). To what extent was it necessary to perform Shakespeare in Bengal proscenium theatres (in imitation of English stages) with ‘Character acting’? The newspaper called ‘Englishman’ at that time, has written about the play Macbeth (which was staged for the opening performance of the ‘Minerva Theatre’) by Girishchandra that “…the reality is an admirable reproduction of all the conventions of an English stage” (Roy Chowdhury & Majumder 62; translated). This trend of doing Shakespeare in the proscenium style, using conventions of the Western theatre, continued even after the independence. Consequently, no proper indigenous theatrical idiom for Shakespearean performance developed.  

In the colonial period, there was more attraction for the adaptation of foreign plays rather than the translation. “The audiences received them very easily when Hamlet became Hariraj or ‘Shylock’ became ‘Kulirok’. Because the real name of the Prince of Denmark was fully unknown for them. Or, in another way we can say that our dramatists (as well the actors of Shakespeare’s plays) have learned from their first-hand experience that without transformation (Bangikaran) of any foreign play in Bengali, it can’t be popularized” (Roy Chowdhury & Majumder 64; translated). Now the question is what did they transform? They transformed only the story line and the names of the characters but kept the structure of the European presentational style. They blended the Indian story line with the European presentation. And the outcome of this is that we have not got any significant play texts in tune with our traditional style, except Rabindranath Tagore. He was the pioneer of this modern Bengali play, not only for written text but also for performance too. And later, after the liberation war in Bangladesh, Selim Al Deen has taken this experimentation to the highest level through his plays as a continuation of Tagore. 

            After the completion of thirty years of his professional theatrical career, Sisir Kumar Bhaduri had said that “if our theatre will build up from Jatra, may be it will be a different thing. …But it has built up from foreign influences. …I have tried to build the National Theatre [of Bengal], but it never happened. So, I wish that what was not possible by me may be done by our next generation” (Roy Chowdhury & Majumder 70; translated). But this has not happened to any significant degree in West Bengal till date, except for a few stray events. Yet this has happened in Bangladesh after the liberation war of 1971. They have developed their own position drawing upon their theatrical heritage and also built up their own ‘National Theatre’ in tune with their traditional culture. ‘Dhaka Theatre’ was the precursor of this. From their beginning, around 1973, they have started to reproduce old traditional and ritual forms of Bengal and presented their theatrical performances in the style of our traditional performances. Reviewing the thousand years history of our narrative style of theatre, Selim Al Deen, the great playwright of Bangladesh started to write the play in traditional theatrical manner of Bengal.

            The Tempest is the latest Bengali version of this traditional narrative play which was transformed by Rubayet Ahmed. The body of the play text and the structure of the presentation both are created adopting our narrative style of theatre. But this play The Tempest of ‘Dhaka Theatre’ entirely adapted and performed according to the Bengali tradition. In an interview, the translator of the play said to a newspaper that “…While translating the script, I kept the context of [our] society in my mind and described it in Panchali, a traditional drama form of Bangladesh which is apparently a blend of dance, dialogue (as well narration) and music” (Rubayet Ahmed; emphasis added).

In the beginning of the play text, The Tempest opens in the midst of a storm, as a ship containing the King of Naples and his party including with his brother Sebastian, Antonio, the usurping Duke of Milan, and other courtiers struggles to stay afloat. All were coming back from the marriage ceremony of the King of Tunis with the daughter of the King of Alanson. On land, Prospero and his daughter, Miranda, watch the storm envelops the ship. Prospero has created the storm with magic, and he explains that his enemies are on board the ship.

As an eye witness of the production at the ‘Globe Theatre’ on 7^th May 2012, a Professor of Drama and Theatre History at Royal Holloway, University of London has written in ‘Blogging Shakespeare” that

The play began as the thirteen actor-musician-singers entered and each picked up one of the painted boxes by its handle; retreating to the back of the stage, they sat cross-legged on red and blue rugs in front of their now opened boxes, which contained props and instruments. The storm began as one of the actors lifted the conch shell set downstage centre and blew a long note on it; then five dancers with small white ships on their wristbands gracefully danced the storm. Leading them was a female figure draped in a floor-length flimsy blue veil, who might have been the sea but was in fact Ariel: a nice conflation of identities in this scene (Christine Dymkowski).

As an eye witness of the play in Kolkata in December 2012 and a verbal discussion with the director of the play we came to know that he always believes in flow of the play. For that, when he had started to make the script, he kept in his mind Palagaan but later he felt that Palagaan is always going in a parallel line. It would be difficult to communicate the play through Palagaan to an audience unfamiliar with the Bengali language. Then he experimented with a mixture of the Natpala which is the traditional Manipuri dance drama and the Panchali the traditional performance style of Bengal.

An internationally acclaimed author, playwright, composer and songwriter John Farndon commented that “Yousuff innovatively blends Shakespeare with the traditional dance of the Manipuri people to create a captivating style of Storytelling” and then he added,

…The actors are not trained dancers, and some may miss the refined grace of classical dancers that takes years to develop. Instead, they are actors who move in a unique way to tell the story. The sea and sand play a central role in the imagery of this production, and the actors have, for instance, developed a light style of moving as if walking on soft sand (John Farndon).

The style of this walking called Pung Chalam has taken from Natpala of Manipur dance. Pung is an instrument of Manipuri dance and Chalam means walking.

Throughout the performance, the troupe squat in a semi-circle at the back of the stage which is the style of Panchali or Perhaps, it is the basic structure of all traditional performances in Bengal. “Each performers are having his or her own colorful tin suitcase [in Bengali, Trunk] of props, costumes and musical instruments. They never leave the stage, but simply get up to play their part before sitting down again – creating a continuity and a bond between audience and players that is often lost in more conventional theatre’ (John Farndon; emphasis added). This is the presentation style of Bangla Natya mainly Panchali. From the research paper of Selim Al Deen, we came to know that “…from the middle age Panchali is one of the special forms to present the Akhayan Kavya (meaning ‘musical drama’) on their traditional stage. In our country, performing arts are mainly based upon music. Panchali is the precursor of this type of presentation. …Mainly, any Akhayan Kavya written in Bengali is the Panchali, no doubt. From the scholars’ point of view, Panchali is not only a music but also a musical performance’ (384-400; translated). This is what The Tempest of Dhaka Theatre was. And also we know that Shakespeare plays are more poetic than prose. So, it is very easy to transform any text of Shakespeare into Bengali Akhayan Kavya than Ibsen and Chekov. The Tempest of Shakespeare itself is a poetic play, interspersed with music, then, after the transformation it becomes a version of Bangla Akhayan Kavya (traditional Bengali play) with European story line.

After the show on 8^th May 2012, the very next day, one musician had written about the play on ‘The Arts Desk’. He said,

This music crept by me on the waters. Bangladesh’s Dhaka Theatre’s version of The Tempest took the musical route, and why not? It was always Shakespeare’s most musical play (with extant music for “Full Fathom Five” and other songs written by Robert Johnson). Four centuries after its premiere, probably over the river in Blackfriars, the play has been done in myriad incarnations around the world, including numerous sci-fi accounts, and bounced back to London last night courtesy of Rubayet Ahmed’s Version (Peter Culshaw).

Works Cited

Ahmed, Rubayet. “Dhaka Theatre Goes to Globe with Tempest.” Priyo News. 14 Mar. 2012,

n. pag. Web. 22 Mar. 2016.

Din, Selin Al. “Madhyayuger Bangla Natya” in Selim Al Deen Rachanasamagra 4. 3^rd

            Chapter, (384-400). Ed., Saymon Zakaria. Dhaka: Mowla Brothers, Feb. 2009. Print.

Dymkowski, Christine. “Year of Shakespeare: The Tempest.” Blogging Shakespeare. 13 May

2012, n. pag. Web. 25 Mar. 2016.

Farndon, John. “Dhaka Theatre Stages Indigenous Tinged Tempest in London.” Daily Star.

            10 May 2012, n. pag. Web. 22 Mar. 2016.

Roy Chowdhury, Subir & Swapan Majumder, eds. “Bharater Kalidas, Jagoter Tumi” in Vilati

            Jatra Theke Svadesi Theatre [East-West Confluences in Bengali Theatre], (59-75).

            Kolkata: Dey’s Publishing, 1999. Print.

Yousuff, Nasiruddin. “Dhaka Theatre to Stage The Tempest at World Shakespeare Festival.”

            Daily Star. 24 Oct. 2011, n. pag. Web. 22 Mar. 2016.