“Of the many white men who found India and Indian theatre fascinating in the twentieth century, three stand out: the English director Peter Brook, who lived and worked in Paris in the latter part of his career; the American scholar Richard Schechner, who is often credited as the one who made performance studies an independent discipline in the academy; and the East German Fritz Bennewitz, who taught and directed in India through extended stays for close to a quarter of a century.Brook came to India searching for what he saw as the universal, non-literary foundations of performance. His gaze, criticized by scholars such as Rustom Bharucha, Govind Deshpande and Ananda Lal, was orientalist, and his India was accordingly mythic, spiritualized and distilled into a universal ‘human’ essence. Brook’s magnum opus was The Mahabharata by Jean-Claude Carrière, performed through the night over nine hours. India was as important to Brook as the pedestal is to the statue.Schechner’s work in India was prolonged, more deeply embedded, and driven by intellectual and academic curiosity. His association with Indian theatre makers such as Ratan Thiyam was marked by mutual respect and reciprocity, and his approach was anthropological, analytical and dialogic. He taught and lectured frequently in India over roughly two decades, and under his editorship, the prestigious journal The Drama Review (TDR) became an important platform for Indian work.Fritz Bennewitz was a Marxist, and remained one till the end of his life, even after the Berlin Wall was brought down. His engagement with India was the lengthiest of the three, and it was the most collaborative, equal and mutually enriching. It was transformative without being extractive.The book presents a detailed, granular account of Bennewitz’s work in India, though it should be said that he worked in other countries as well, particularly in the Philippines. But clearly, India was his karmabhoomi. He did more than anyone else to popularize German theatre in India, especially plays by his two favourite writers, Bertolt Brecht and Goethe, along with Volker Braun. He also directed plays by Sophocles and Anton Chekhov, among others. While his contributions are somewhat forgotten in his native Germany, in India, he remains a figure that a large number of theatre persons recall with gratitude and affection.Bennewitz was gay, but not very public about it. His life companion and confidante, however, was a woman by the name of Waltraut Mertes. She was secretary to the artistic director of the German National Theatre in Weimar, Otto Lang. Bennewitz and Mertes became friends there, and in 1976, when he was involved in a serious car crash that left him blind in his right eye, she nursed him back to health. He moved into her house, and from then till his death, they remained companions.When Bennewitz travelled abroad, often for long periods, he wrote letters to Mertes. These letters are a combination of quotidian details and a record of his work. But for these letters, the book under review would not have been possible. They are a kind of work journal, and Bennewitz records in great detail the day-to-day progress of his work in the many regions and languages of India that he engaged with. After his death in 1995, Mertes handed his entire archive—the letters, of course, but also a large number of documents and other materials—to an association of his friends, who then set up the Fritz Bennewitz Archive in Leipzig. Even after this the publication of the book was still a long, difficult and sometimes tortuous journey. One can only marvel at the tenacity and fortitude of all the people involved in this project. But for their heroic efforts, this valuable contribution to the history of modern Indian theatre would never have seen the light of day.As if the editorial labour involved in selecting the texts to be included in the volume, introducing, glossing and annotating them, was not formidable enough, Bennewitz’s style of writing presented its own challenge. Joerg Esleben gives us a peek at what he was faced with, by providing a passage in the original German (with the lines that Bennewitz had struck through and the words and phrases he had written in all caps), alongside a column where the same text appears in a close English translation, and the final edited version in a third column. To compare the three is a study in excellent editing.Bennewitz’s first production in India was Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera with the National School of Drama, New Delhi, in 1970. His last production was Goethe’s Faust I for the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai, in 1994. These bookends were fitting because his association with both these institutions was long and deep. In between, he worked with institutions such as Ninasam in the village of Heggodu in Karnataka, the Calcutta Repertory Theatre in Kolkata, Prayoga Theatre Group in Bangalore, Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal, Padatik in Kolkata, Shri Ram Centre Repertory Company in New Delhi, Bhartendu Natya Academy in Lucknow, Rangayana in Mysore, and Centre of the ITI in Dhaka, Bangladesh. This list is impressive not only for the number of institutions, locations, and languages he worked in, but also because the background and training of the actors and others he worked with varied widely, as did the infrastructure that he had access to. Coming as he did from East Germany, where theatre companies and the infrastructure needed to make theatre were both generously supported, India must have presented him with a steep learning curve. Only a man with an extraordinarily open mind, unbounded passion, and a life-long commitment to learning could have continued as he did.The book is divided into two parts. The first consists of Bennewitz’s own writings on his work in India, and the second contains reflections and responses to his work by collaborators and scholars. These are warm and appreciative, but not uncritical, and give the contemporary theatre artist much food for thought. Bennewitz is remembered in India as a director and a teacher. However, his approach did not exalt the guru, nor did he romanticize pedagogy as something inspirational. He taught as he was learning, and he learned as he taught. As Anuradha Kapur puts it in her interview in the book: ‘He was so able to make the contradiction and the dialectic function; it was a great relief: he was able, I think, for many of us to take away the sentimentalizing of the guru tradition, or the acting tradition, of history, of folk, of authenticity—he just taught. It was really liberating; you didn’t have to constantly prove with him that you’re Indian.’I remember watching some of his productions in the 1980s, when I was a teenager and just starting to learn about Marxism and the work of Brecht. I was struck by how much fun his productions were, how alive and energetic, without ever fetishizing the ‘folk’, as some other self-proclaimed ‘Brechtian’ productions did. Reading this book, especially his notes, I realize why. Bennewitz did not approach Brecht dryly, as a ‘theorist’. Brecht was a storyteller, his characters were alive, and the contradictions in their characters and in the circumstances, they found themselves in were the result of the playing out of the dialectic of history. History is made by humans, but the circumstances in which they operate are given to them by history. Brecht’s plays exemplified this dialectic; Bennewitz brought it to life.This book is a valuable addition to the somewhat meagre literature in India on the theatre-making process from the vantage point of the one doing the making. One only wishes that books such as this were possible for Indian theatre makers—but likely not, since most of them were not half as meticulous in keeping a record of their own creative processes as Bennewitz was, and even fewer, if any, would have had a Waltraut Mertes in their life.”
—Sudhanva Deshpande is an actor and publisher, and the author of Halla Bol: The Death and Life of Safdar Hashmi, The Book Review, Volume L Number 4 April 2026