The balladeer of Reading Gaol must be cheering quietly in his grave. Even with his artist?s vision, he could not have foreseen when he pointed out that ?Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life? the events that were to take place in the Academy of Fine Arts in Calcutta 114 years later. A posse of policemen from two police stations burst into the theatre hall just before a performance had ended, professedly in search of an actor charged with cheating and rape. It is a comic twist of irony that the play being staged was Phataru, based on stories by Mr Nabarun Bhattacharya, which are satiric send-ups of social, cultural and official institutions and their functionaries. The police come off rather poorly in the Phataru chronicles, to the great entertainment of the consumers. Reportedly, the policemen?s entry was greeted at first with much enthusiasm from the audience as a natural part of the play. It took some time before it became clear that the gentlemen in uniform were from a different plane of reality altogether.

The crassness of the police, against which the director of the play and other theatre personalities put up a joint protest the day after the intrusion, then veered even closer to their fictional counterparts? bumbling in the Phataru stories. They allegedly shoved aside the director, and charged into the women?s greenrooms after being told that actors were changing there. It would require some creativity to identify the impulse behind this outrageous violation. They may have thought that an actor charged with rape rushes to the women?s greenroom at every free moment to continue his favourite activity, or, in all the excitement they had forgotten the gender of the alleged rapist, or, they thought that he had hidden in the women?s rooms. That is what they would have done under similar circumstances, probably.

The director has lodged a complaint with the police about the posse?s conduct. It is obvious that they ?violated the sanctity? of the playhouse, were rough and deliberately disruptive ? they reportedly broke some of the props ? and appeared deaf to reason. The police said they were acting on orders, and had rushed into the performance when they failed to find their man in either of his houses or his usual workplaces. But that does not explain the mad rush. The police are rather short on self-confidence if they are not sure of catching a practising actor should he escape. Had it been possible to suspect the police of a taste for contemporary Bengali writing, other motives for their destructiveness could have been thought of. While the police were busy in the women?s rooms, the actor they were pursuing reportedly changed and left. As always happens in comic fiction. Oscar Wilde could not have felt more fulfilled.