London [England] : Methuen Drama (UK), 2019 ; London [England] : Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019
Language:
English
Notes:
In 1901 Tagore founded an experimental school for boys and wrote plays to be performed by his students. Arguably the best known of these is Dak Ghar (The Post Office, 1912). This play, written in just four days, is from his Gitanjali period ('Songs of Offering'), which had among its dominant themes death and passage into the next life. In this one-act, Amal is a sick child watching life pass, seeing the construction of a modern post office and imagining that he might someday receive a letter from the king. The play was first performed by and for schoolboys at Tagore's school in Santiniketan. The first western performance was just two years later in 1914 at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It has subsequently been translated into many languages and performed throughout the world. Its themes of liberation and transcending difficult situations through imagination, creativity and love of life made the play a favourite during the Second World War, with famous productions in Polish in the Warsaw Ghetto and a Paris radio production on the eve of the Nazi invasion.--