Alipore Ahana, a theatre group that has been around for quite some time, has come up with Char Prohor, an effort that can be seen as a revival of sorts. The play was written seven decades ago by the late (and somewhat forgotten) Biru Mukhopadhyay. Ahana, under the leadership of the director, Dipankar Chatterjee, has brought the play back from oblivion.
Written at a time when India was in its infancy as an independent, sovereign nation-state, the play has as its central thematic concern systematic corruption that had begun to plague government projects. The 1950s was a period when the nation was literally being built — dams, roadways, factories and other infrastructural facilities were being rapidly constructed across the nation at the behest of the government and, sadly but inexorably, structures of large-scale corruption were also being put into place within such construction ventures by unscrupulous profiteers of various professions. The narrative of Char Prohor revolves around an instance of corruption threatening to undermine a dam-construction project.
The issue with the play is that the director has assumed that contemporary relevance is a matter only of content and has nothing to do with form. Chatterjee should know better than to rely on odd references to emails and mobile phones as the only strategy of injecting temporal immediacy. In terms of form, Char Prohor remains a standard drawing-room drama, rehashing a design that has now become dated and stale.
The only saving grace is the acting — most of the cast perform competently, with Debashree Mukherjee, Amit Ganguly and Pratim Ganguly deserving special mention as they effectively portray their characters without much fanfare while sticking to an old-school, naturalistic mode of acting. The play demands serious editing as there are sections that are quite extraneous to the plot. A very troubling aspect is the politically incorrect and offensive caricature-like portrayal of tribal characters — evidently, the Bengali bhadralok impulse to crudely stereotype tribal figures is a hard-to-discard cultural habit.