Of Actors and Their Craft

This is a deeply pleasurable, immersive and impressive collection. It is a compilation about actors, their thoughts, ideas, craft and it captures the milieus in which they have lived and worked. The Act Of Becoming edited by Amal Allana is a collaborative publication by Niyogi Books and The National School of Drama. It provides us with accounts of 22 theatre actors from the 1880s to the present. The story of contemporary Indian theatre has been lovingly constructed by using references to recorded interviews, memoirs, family photographs and oral history. The editor has crafted a thorough and complex book which is, at the same time, extremely readable. It is full of the voices of the actors and their struggles, all of which are humanizing and familiar.