Soumitra Chattopadhyay’s Homa Pakhi at Pragati Natya Utsav

Bally Rabindra Bhavan was bursting at its seams on the evening of May 24 as the audience settled down to watch Soumitra Chattopadhyay. The veteran actor took the stage with his play Homa Pakhi, an old production but brought to Bally for the first time. Residents here had never got the chance to watch the father-daughter duo on stage.

Soumitra’s daughter, Poulomi, plays the London-based consultant-psychiatrist, who has returned home in Calcutta to cope with her depression and stress. The play was being staged at Liluah-based theatre group, Pragati’s, tenth theatre festival held at Bally Rabindra Bhavan from May 21 to 25. The festival, that was supposed to have taken place earlier in April, was postponed till the end of May because of the Lok Sabha elections. In the past few years, the members of Pragati have been trying to rope in popular theatre groups from Calcutta for their annual theatre festival.

“We had invited Soumitra Chattopadhyay last year to our festival too and he had staged Qurbani. This year Kaushik Sen and Kanchan Mullick made their first appearance at our festival,” said Abir Ghosh, the founder member of Pragati.

Apart from Soumitra Chattopadhyay’s play, the festival also included Swapnasandhani’s Thana Theke Aschi that was staged on May 21. Ekush Satak’s dramatical, Tamoghna, based on a forgotten revolutionary, Madhusudhan Gupta, was staged on May 22 and the host group staged its new play Rajpat on May 23. The curtains fell on Rangrup’s Jalchabi.

Swapnasandhani staged Thana Theke Aschi. Pictures by Gopal Senapati

For the past 10 years, the 24-year old group, Pragati has been organising this theatre festival in Liluah and later in Bally, which has gradually grown in size. “We had started with short plays, organising festivals for two or three days. But now we organise festivals of full-length plays over a span of five days. Till last year we invited small groups from districts or even from Calcutta to give them an opportunity to stage their plays. However, this year’s festival concentrated only on popular plays from the Calcutta stage,” said Abir. Many of the well-known groups from Calcutta have performed at Pragati’s festival.

Pragati was founded by a group of friends in Liluah after their Madhyamik exams. They wanted to do something creative and got together to do a play. Fun became a serious effort which resulted in the formation of Pragati 24 years back. Gradually, the group has managed to organise itself, although a few of its members have left.

Some of their productions include Manoj Mitra’s Parabas and a popular one-act play Pathar, that they had staged at various call shows. The group also has short plays like Nepathye, Uddhar and Marich Sangbad to its name. They had organised a Rabindra mela in Liluah to celebrate Rabindranath Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary.

Dalia Mukherjee