Sabitri Chatterjee in Nati Bilas

Staging a comeback after a long hiatus becomes a more difficult proposition as one grows old. Sabitri Chatterjee’s return to theatre must have taken great courage, but she does it with the same fortitude that she has shown in personal life. Critics may sneer that she has not been away that long — she last acted on stage in Badshahi Chal (1996) — but eight years does amount to a lot when one is 67. Time and the body do not allow an actor to read just easily to the rigours of performing the lead in a full-scale production at that age.

Sabitri Devi retired owing to the paucity of challenging scripts. She maintains that Kolkata Repertory Theatre’s Nati Bilas (Rabindra Sadan, July 11) will be her last stand, since she does not expect the situation in Bengali playwriting to improve. Of course, her experience lies mainly in commercial theatre, which has anyway given up the ghost here. She agreed to join in this new group’s debut attracted by the situations in Salil Sarkar’s drama, to which she could relate.

The play features a former actress whose industrialist husband constantly goads her about her dependence on him and inability to earn her own living. She launches on a project of rescuing her self-esteem, but finds that the profession has no need for older women. One company does require a senior male actor, though. She auditions for them, impersonating a man, and gets the job. The rest is predictable, even melodramatic: a huge success, she must tour the districts nonstop with the show, drawing the jealousy of her husband, who suspects her of having an affair with another actor.

Subjective echoes must have resounded for Sabitri Devi. She was born the youngest of 10 sisters, the only one among them who did not marry — for a reason that all artistically-inclined Bengalis know. When she debuted in 1948 in Tipu Sultan in Dhaka, she was possibly the first “respectable” actress on the East Bengali stage. Migrating to Calcutta, she became famous in such plays as Natun Ihudi, Adarsha Hindu Hotel, Shyamali, Shreyasi — particularly in roles giving women preeminence.

Thus, despite a certain slowing-down of reflexes and a tired look in her eyes, she enacts the oppressed woman donning men’s parts with grace. She performs excerpts from Tagore’s Rather Rashi (as the poet), Sukumari Datta’s Apurba Sati and Brojen De’s Nati Binodini (as Girish Ghosh). In Ghosh’s character, she does seem to change gender. She receives good support from Subrata Ghosh, her theatre buddy.

Cleverly, Nati Bilas comprises not just plays within a play, but has an outer frame of a documentary shot about the renowned actresses’ life, clips of which are screened. Parthasarathi Deb, director of Nati Bilas, himself plays the forth-coming film director, located in the auditorium. However, the brochure, a collector’s item published by Bangla Natyakosh Parishad, wrongly claims that Sabitri Devi has not won national honours: she received the Sangeet Natak Akademi award in 2000.