Columnist
Theatre and politics
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Badal Sircar, who passed
away recently, was the founder of what he baptised as the Third Theatre. He
performed his plays on the streets and in open spaces, as against the
proscenium — a conventional and colonial addiction. He was one among the
pioneers of the parallel theatre movement in India during the turbulent 1960s. The
street theatre focusing on social and political issues was inclusive in the
sense, it banished the aesthetic distance between the performers and the
audience. The viewers had a participatory function in the sequential narration
of the play.