THE ACT
Robi’s Garden is a dramatised performance based on Rabindranath Tagore’s tales.
The material is drawn from a great fund of Tagore’s writing, a lot of it for children, but enjoyed by grown-up audiences widely. These include verse, prose, short stories, plays, sketches (his “riddle plays”), fantasies, autobiographical writing, (esp. his childhood memories), and the letters to his grand-daughter and other children.
A small group of children is on an excursion to Jorasanko where Tagore’s ancestral home is located in Kolkata. They enter the courtyard theatre in Thakur-badi and sense a magical air surrounding them. The caretaker of the estate shares an important mantra of Robi-da with the children – that the first step in getting what you want in life is …. imagination. It is the surest way to have Robi-da’s stories come alive on the courtyard stage. And they do – in Robi’s Garden!