COLOMBO THEATRE FORUM

Scholars, Directors, Script writers, Actors & Actresses, Critics, Lighting Directors, Back stage creators, Stage managers, students and spectators can join this forum in order to widen their horizons in the field of theatre.

Colombo Theatre forum organized by Inter Act Art theatre and Goethe - Institut Sri Lanka was recommenced last July with the Participation of many young theatre lovers and foreign delegates. The forum will be held last Tuesday of this month at the Goethe Institut Hall from 5.00 pm onwards.
The forth forum of this series is titled:-" MIRROR OF THE AGE" This documentary film and the discussion will take place on 27th Feb 2018 (Curator - M. Safeer/ Hemantha Prasad)

Mirror of the Age

East Germany is a theatre paradise. Sixty state subsidized theatres played for a potential 16 million spectators and the artists, with life contracts, enjoyed a social security that artists in other countries only dream of. Moreover, theprestigious theatrical tradition in the GDR, founded on Bertolt Brecht's political and aesthetic concept of a "Theatre of the New Age", lent the productions their distinctive profile and mounded productions from the highest artistic level.

The socialist state be jeweled itself with its theatre culture but it also upheld the doctrine that art was not just a commodity but a human right. Theatre makers in the GDR were determined to make the most of their allotted roles. But the more the state instigated gap between reality and the ideal widened, the more the theatre found itself caught in a conflict between fellow-travelling and opposition.

In recent years, the theatre in the GDR assumed the role of "the conscience of the nation", an unusual role which it took on with responsibility and played with strength. The theatre that Brecht had enjoyed "to change the world", now took his instruction at its word.