The birth centenary of Badal Sircar (1925-2011) offered an opportunity to revisit proscenium theatre’s love and hate relationship with the maverick playwright who had famously ‘disowned’ most of the plays he had written before 1970 and started working on a theatre aesthetics that is free from the trappings of cultural capitalism. Interestingly, only a handful of groups — from Bengal and beyond — took a fresh look at Sircar’s oeuvre. While most of them played it straight, some tried to stitch it with
contemporary realities and a few others reworked Sircar’s original ideas to craft new plays.
Pagla Ghoda, staged by Ekrang (Mumbai), falls in the first category. This was the inaugural piece in Little Thespian’s 15th National Theatre Festival, titled Jashn-e-Azhar, held at Gyan Manch. Jayant Deshmukh, the director, followed Pratibha Agrawal’s faithful Hindi translation of Sircar’s play which is a systematic dissection of man-woman relationships across four different socio-economic contexts. The juvenile rhyme, “Aam pata jora jora”, with which the play opens, resists translation since the cultural signifiers get obliterated in the process. Yet Agrawal’s rendering quietly conveys the crispness of Sircar’s dialogue and his argumentative flair, making the playwright accessible to a wider linguistic audience. Deshmukh follows the original text written in 1967, designing a minimalistic burning ghat setting where dream and reality converge, where past and present coalesce. Despite its good intentions, the production falters as it goes along, only to recover some ground towards the end. The male actors, namely Mahendra Raghuvanshi, Anil Dubey, Aditya Singh Raghuwanshi, and Soman Chouhan, leave a mark.
Tringsha Shatabdi (1966) — arguably the most verbose of Sircar’s works that was composed during his peak phase — is a docu-drama based on contemporary research on the atomic bombing of the Japanese town of Hiroshima. Veteran Pradip Chakrabarti left no stone unturned to make it a psychologically engaging drama, rejecting every insinuation of a spectacle in the name of theatre design. This Tollygunge Theatre Wings’ production (picture, left) (Sisir Mancha), despite the group’s lack of experience in handling a courtroom drama and its rather nonchalant use of chorus, presents a case for rational thinking in the time of breaking of nations. Among the actors, Romit Ganguly’s impassionate outburst leaves a mark as a calm Chakrabarti holds his guard as Albert Einstein. Sadhan Parui’s light design creates a few arresting silhouettes against a pitch-dark backdrop.
Anandapur Somporko’s Kagojer Golap (picture, right) may look like a casual flirtation with Sircar’s little-known play, Rupkathar Kelenkari (1974). Written a year before the infamous Emergency gagged the nation’s freedom of expression, the play’s clairvoyant quality speaks at various levels to our times. The young group (consisting mostly of teenagers) presents a faithful enactment of Sircar’s sarcastic take on media freedom in the guise of a regular, fairy-tale romance. Sneha Bhattacharya, playing the narrator, is a genuine talent. This collective effort is underlined by a variety of asides and spoofs, especially a Superman-like figure with “Market is Alive” written on his chest and a liberal critique of popular symbols and popular culture — from para cricket to tea stalls. The group’s adeptness in scenography surfaced time and again during the recent Girish Mancha show. The climax featuring a Brechtian moment in support of the children of Gaza remains etched in the mind.