Carl Weber 
 
 
actress appeared in the role. 
     Set and costumes (Design: Richard Berry) were most 
 professionally executed in the drab and detailed realism aimed for by 
 the production, while the traditional opera scenes provided a burst of 
 colorful costumes and masks. If this production is representative for 
 the level of acting and technical production the Hong Kong Academy 
 has accomplished in its barely two years of training, many American 
 schools could learn from their work. 
     Both Hong Kong productions evidenced the Western training of 
 their directors, and this aspect deserves a closer analysis than 
 possible here. But then, almost everything in Hong Kong shows the 
 stamp of Western civilization and how could the theatre but reflect 
 this. 
 
     It was not until the mid-Sixties that Brecht was introduced to the 
 Indian theatre which, of course, consists of many theatre cultures in 
 many languages. I directed one of the first Indian Brecht productions 
 (1968), The Caucasian Chalk Circle, at the Asian Theatre Institute of 
 New Delhi, and found it fascinating how well Brecht's performance 
 gestus fitted the theatrical instincts and talents of the native actors.

 The Bengali theatre had discovered Brecht at the same time and The 
 Threepenny Opera was the first of his works shown in Calcutta in 1969. 
 Meanwhile, ten plays have been staged and several of them have had 
 popular runs. 
      Unity Theatre, one of the 1200 (!) professional or amateur 
companies in this city of 12 million people, brought its performance of 
Puntila and his Man Mattito Hong Kong. The company has been active 
for 15 years and has produced three Brecht plays but also other 
translations from the German, by Dbrrenmatt, Horvath, and Kroetz. Its 
director since 1979, Sekhar Chatterjee, is obviously an actor-manager 
in the Anglo-Indian tradition: he adopted and directed the piece, he 
composed the folksy music, and he plays the lead who has become 
Pontu Laha (as the play is called now), Bengali landowner and master 
of chauffeur Moti to whom, in one of his drunken bouts, he wants to 
marry his daughter Radha. While Puntila commands Matti to build him 
Mount Hatelma with his library's furniture, drunk Pontu Laha has Moti 
pile up the smashed furniture of his counting house and, helped onto it,

proclaims he is on a Himalaya expedition. 
     Chatterjee plays Pontu Laha in a most economic mode, with 
minimal effort of voice and gesture but an impressive presence. Few of 
the other actors can hold their own against him; Moti is cast with a 
popular Bengali movie actor, Subrato Bhattarcharjee, who hardly ever 
transcends the clich6 of the virile leading man and fails to explore the

dialectics of the role. However, Debdut Bose as the Attach4 Ayan truly 
excels with an hilarious, chaplinesque performance. Swagata 
Roychoudhury's voluptuous Radha shows only the spoiled and silly 
rich girl, pouting, giggling, petulant; that she is also the victim of a

patriarchal, exploitative order seems never to have dawned upon the 
director or the actress. 
    Still, the production is swift, entertaining, and brings off many of

 
 
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