Bengali Othello, Little Theatre Group, 1958. Utpal Dutt as Othello, Shekhar Chattopadhyay as Iago. via
A Marxist, Utpal Dutt also had links with the historic Indian People's Theatre Association. He wrote a scholarly if doctrinaire Bengali work on Shakespeare's social philosophy, and presented Shakespeare in the same vein through his Little Theatre Group in the 1950s and 1960s before moving on to other distinguished work. He estimates having had a hand in at least 16 Shakespeare productions. Among them are Macbeth (1954, performed at least 100 times in Bengal villages as well as Kolkata), The Merchant of Venice (1955), Julius Caesar (1957), Othello (1958), Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer-Night's Dream (both 1964). Yet the play Dutt declared himself to prefer above all was Timon, of which, in despite of his own views, he offered a surprising Christian interpretation in his book on Shakespeare.