and Shanta Gandhi, in the coming decades it produced a number a noted theatre actors and directors. The National School of Drama Repertory Company was set up in 1964, with actor-director Om Shivpuri as its first head, followed by Manohar Singh, and other actors like Uttara Baokar, Sudha Shivpuri and Surekha Sikri. RADA-trained Alkazi turned out to be the most influential director in the post-independence period; his Hindi productions of Sanskrit classics, like Abhijnana Shakuntalam, Dharamvir Bharati's Andha Yug, Girish Karnad's Tughlaq, and the realism of his take on Mohan Rakesh's Asadh Ka Ek Din brought a fresh approach to theatricality, and sophistication to Hindi theatre, and set up standards that inspired an entire generation. His production of Dharamvir Bharati's Andha Yug premiered in 1964 at the Firoz Shah Kotla and was attended by prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. A pioneer of the modern theatre movement in North India, Raj Bisaria- a highly revered stage director, he has a through grounding in western classics and contemporary dramatic works. Raj Bisaria tried that the dramatic and performing arts conform to a professional discipline and communicate through a new aesthetic medium. His plays are concerned with man-women relationship, and social issues of special concern to him. Through the productions of European and Indian plays since 1966, Raj Bisaria presented a wide spectrum of contemporary world drama as director and designer, setting his own parallel, pursues the theatre of excellence. He has ventured to blend artistic concepts and impulse of the East and the West, the traditional and the modern, and has been passionately devoted to the cause of theatre and acting. It is his firm belief that this art form can be used for its therapeutic qualities for the overall healthy development of personality of the young, apart from being a vehicle for disseminating information, and creating consciousness about social- political issues, as indeed affording aesthetic and ennobling enlightenment and enriching the cultural consciousness of modern India. Largely using his own devices and creative expression he began his work in the English and began to use Hindustani as the spoken medium of expression from the 1973. He has encouraged folk theatre form of UP - the Nautanki. Raj Bisaria suggested to the State Government that he should start a semi-professional repertory theatre in Uttar Pradesh, in 1974 the State Government went a few steps further and requested him to evolve a scheme for