It has been the hallmark of Rakesh Ghosh’s career as playwright-director to question gender stereotypes through a clinical dissection of the lives of famous Bengalis with androgynous traits. With Radha-ramakrishna, staged by Kalyani Kalamandalam and directed by Santanu Das, Ghosh enters the cloistered ecosystem of the Shakti cult, intertwined with Vaishnava aesthetics.
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa’s empathy towards the transgender community, highlighted during his stay in Dakshineswar, and his experiments with Radha bhava form the basis of Radha-ramakrishna. Ghosh interpolates scenes from the Bengali public theatre where Binodini Dasi, under the tutelage of Girish Chandra Ghosh, plays Chaitanya Mahaprabhu in Star Theatre’s legendary Chaitanya Leela. The two narratives run parallelly. Das complicates the act further by casting a female actor (the ever-reliable Monalisa Chatterjee) as Ramakrishna and a male actor with an androgynous bearing (the charming Ranjan Bose) as Binodini. Although Das goes overboard by suggesting Ramakrishna’s menstrual blood, the production maintains dramatic tension throughout. Chatterjee pulls off a near-impossible act with a dedicated portrayal of a man possessed.
Cross-gender acting was commonplace in the early years of Bengali public theatre because of the paucity of female actors. On March 14, 1890, one such actor, namely Amritalal Mukherjee, alias Belbabu, died under mysterious circumstances. Ghosh takes a leaf out of Bratya Basu’s novel, Adamrita Katha, and constructs a make-believe world where an unidentified androgynous man interrogates Girish Chandra Ghosh and his accomplices, thus exploring the life and the times of a non-celebrated actor who found fulfilment in female impersonation.
Ghosh, who also directs this production, attempts a reading of Belbabu’s mind by crafting dream sequences against a surreal backdrop. He upsets some stage stereotypes — casting a lean Sudipta Dutta to play Girish Chandra Ghosh — and opts for a melodramatic acting pattern to suit the period feel. The verboseness of the drama seems balanced. Ranjan Bose, essaying the title part, displays remarkable panache.