Subodh Patnaik has recently directed and designed a workshop production, Dhappa, with mostly young actors from Bohurupee. It is a Bengali adaptation of Molière’s comedy, Tartuffe, first performed in 1664 in Versailles. Molière satirizes the trope of blind faith in fraud religious preachers through a dramatic crisscrossing of conflicts, sentiments and world views within members of a family.The Bengali adaptation closely followed the fluidity of plot as in the original — Arjun and his mother unquestioningly adhere to a fraud religious guru, Babaji; the guru desires wealth and Arjun’s wife, Annapurna; their son, daughter and the servant are suspicious of Babaji’s intentions; Arjun announces the marriage of his daughter to Babaji and donates his house in his name until finally Annapurna, with the aid of others, plants tricks to unmask the Babaji who, in the end, is ousted and justice is restored. Tartuffe was considered capable of stirring religious and moral belief systems and was thus censored by King Louis XIV in the 17th century. This adaptation does not talk to contemporary times. The embedded critique of religious fanaticism in the original play could have travelled through channels of history and culture to launch poignant comments in the broader social and political context of our times.

I remember the director’s note as he situated this as a process of developing a play framed by the Indian aesthetics of drama. The process driven workshop comes to surface in the exuberance of the form — the use of chorus and masks, the multiple shifts that actors make from character roles to chorus, design in the stage space and live music. While the actors skilfully negotiated with the multiple levels, built-in set to denote the outside and the inside, the production, in terms of its form and the high-strung mode of acting, might have been more appropriate in a proscenium rather than in an intimate space. Banani as the servant and Sekhar as Babaji stood out for their acting.

But then how does one view a workshop production? Does a simple storyline dotted with classical characters help explore aesthetics and form better?