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VII
THE PLAYWRIGHT
79

by speaking of the movement for an improved Hindoo theatre at Calcutta. When Chunder wrote, Rabindranath was only a boy of eight; another six or seven years and he was already helping in the movement for a new theatre. We need hardly exclaim over the taking of feminine parts and the chief parts too in a piece, by boys as being at all strange, when we remember how our own theatre for long followed the same custom. On the unadorned stage at Shanti Niketan the boys of the school take the most exacting parts, needing both mimetic and vocal skill, with great spirit and without awkwardness; and at Bradfield College we have seen the same practice maintained admirably in Greek drama.

Of the two plays acted over here. The Post Office (Dakghar in the original) and The King of the Dark Chamber, I saw the first when it was produced at the Court Theatre, with Synge's mordant comedy, The Well of the Saints, as an incongruous companion-piece. The story of The Post Office turns upon the longing of a small boy who is a prisoner, unable to be moved from the village hut, where sickness holds him fast. He is hope's most pitiful pensioner, living in a