Books & Authors Quiz: Famous Plays and Dramatists

Mrichchhakatika is a ten-act play about the love of a poor Brahmin merchant for a courtesan, set against a palace revolution, and its English title The Little Clay Cart comes from a toy cart that appears in the story.

Mudrarakshasa is a political drama whose plot turns on the statecraft of Chanakya as he brings down the Nandas and places Chandragupta Maurya on the throne, and historians use it as a literary source for that change of dynasty.

It tells the story of King Pururavas and the celestial nymph Urvashi.

Swapnavasavadattam, the dream of Vasavadatta, turns on King Udayana and his queen and is regarded as his finest work; Urubhanga and Pratima Nataka are also his.

The Natyashastra lays down the rules of the stage, of acting, gesture, music and stagecraft, and gives the theory of rasa, the set of aesthetic moods a performance is meant to create in its audience; it is the foundation of all later Indian dramatic and dance theory.

In Waiting for Godot two tramps pass the time by a bare tree waiting for a man who never arrives, and the play became the defining work of the Theatre of the Absurd, the movement that refused ordinary plot and meaning in order to show life as it felt after…

Pygmalion, in which a professor of phonetics trains a flower girl to speak like a duchess, is his most widely known play, and his others include Arms and the Man, Man and Superman and Saint Joan.

A Doll's House ends with Nora leaving her husband and her children, a conclusion that scandalised audiences and made the play a landmark of realistic social theatre; Ghosts and An Enemy of the People belong to the same phase of his work.

Tughlaq uses the reign of Muhammad bin Tughlaq to speak about idealism turning into failure, and Hayavadana draws on a tale from the Kathasaritsagara about exchanged heads; Nagamandala and Yayati are also his, and he received the Jnanpith Award.

Ashadh ka Ek Din imagines the poet Kalidasa torn between his village love and the glory offered by the court at Ujjayini, and it is counted the first fully modern Hindi play; Aadhe Adhure and Lahron ke Rajhans are his other major works.