Popular theatre troupe Shomoy will present their plays Shesh Songlap and Bhager Manush at the 16th Ganga Jamuna Theatre Festival in Kolkata. Organised by the West Bengal’s theatre Aneek, the festival has begun on December 22 and will continue till January 3.
Shomoy is going to stage Shesh Songlap on December 27 at Kolkata Academy and Bhager Manush on December 28 at Niranjan Sadan.
Directed by Akhteruzzaman, Shomoy’s highly-praised production, Shesh Songlap is an adaptation of Egyptian playwright Towfiq Al Hakim’s well-acclaimed play Sultan’s Dilemma. Syed Jamil Ahmed and M Saiful Alam Chowdhury translated it into Bangla. The play is about a Mamluk sultan who at the height of his power learns that he was not born to the immediate past sultan. He was brought up as a slave child, adopted by the late sultan and raised as a prince. However, during death his foster father never freed him from his bondage. The law of the state, however, states that a slave can never rule over free men.
On the other hand, Mannan Heera has adapted Bhager Manush from a popular Urdu short story Toba Tek Singh by Saadat Hasan Manto. Here, the play satires the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 which brought immense suffering to the people living in the border areas of the two countries - India and Pakistan.
The theatre troupe will set off to Kolkata from Dhaka today along with their twenty six members.
