Ghosh's verse and knows how to speak it he can speak anything under the sun. He is then already fully trained as an actor, as a speaker. An actor has two parts to him: his speech and his body. If one takes Girish Ghosh's adaptation of Meghnad Badh and puts it up as a training course for actors—as we do in our school—it will free the language of all defects of speech, localisms, the influence of dialects, and will enable, the actor to speak verse, Bengali verse. Our actors have been able to speak this—they are also part-time like in other groups—and I don't see why all other groups shouldn't be able to do it. Only, I think the trouble is that there is no one to coach. I was fortunate only because my first role in films was as Michael Madhusudan Dutt... MRB '. I still remember your acting in it..... UD : ....and I had to go through pages and pages of recitation of Michael. That was in 1949-50. I was coached by very important whole-time actors, like Manoranjan Bhattacharya. You see. that's another thing. These so-called group theatres, most of them, have lost all roots. They do not wish to link up with their past—old Bengali theatre orjatra—so they are just rootless lumpen theatre. They don't wish to learn anything from their predecessors. I believe that there is no such thing as a theatre which is born out of nothing. The theatre is part of a tradition, the further growth of a tradition. The political theatre today in West Bengal should inherit the entire tradition of the Bengali professional theatre, of thejatra, of everything. MRB : Well, I am glad you have brought up this business of the disappearance of the word. From a number of theatrical productions we have seen lately around us, it seens to have become very fashionable—and sometimes a kind of radicalism is tagged on to it—to have a lot of physical action, a lot of nartan-kurdan (dancing and leaping). I am afraid the strength of the word is very fast disappearing from a great many of these productions. We think that this is not merely lamentable, but that something rather nasty and brutal is being done to the theatre. We would like to have your comment on this. Have you seen any of these productions at all ? UD : Yes, I have seen most of them. And I think it is due to this great alienation from their own language. As we walk down the streets of Calcutta we hear young fellows speak their great language, the Bengali language, and you can't make out a single word. It'sjust...owowowow... (UD mimics the intonation of inarticulate street language). This is all you hear, and this is finding its way into our theatre movement, because the people who are in the theatre movement are just lumpens like them. They are not holding on to the tradition of the theatre. Every theatre group must make a rule that anyone who can't speak his own language, can't speak Michael and Rabindranath, has no place in the theatre, he must go somewhere else. Of course he might be called upon to play a lumpen, then he must make an. effort to speak like that; or he might be called upon to play a peasant from Dinajpur, and he must make an effort to learn the dialect. But without standard poetic Bengali, how is that possible ? First of all he must be adept at his own Journal of Arts and Ideas 41