A scene from Sanjhbela

Sayak?s Sanjhbela is its latest excursion into its favourite genre, the well-made play. Indrasish Lahiri has dramatised Bimal Kar?s story, which bears more than a passing resemblance to Ibsen?s Ghosts. A matron of a rural hospital, who separated from her husband many years ago, lives with her college-going son and daughter, now back home for their holidays. A train accident brings an amnesiac patient into their lives; it turns out that the mother knows him. When she invites him to stay on, her children rebel and leave. The stranger, however, steps in and saves the day.

The location, relationships and plot have changed, and Ibsen?s incestuous complexities sanitised into safe, acceptable moral conflicts, but the basic situation remains the same. In both plays, the absent fathers had estranged their wives by philandering; the prodigal sons follow in the fathers? footsteps by romancing the maidservants; the mothers receive a shock when they stumble on this sight; and they share companionship with an old friend whom they might have married in the past, but did not.

There the similarities end. Ibsen writes tightly, using five characters; Sanjhbela sprawls over eleven, half of them superfluous, minimising the roles of both the maid and her father into mere agents for the storyline. Whereas Ibsen?s Pastor Manders is a stuffy puritan, here the benign stranger from the past resolves the problem selflessly.

The ending of Sanjhbela departs the farthest from Ghosts: not only does it avert tragedy with a happy reunion (of course, at the cost of the most dispensable person?s happiness), but also sentimentally like any self-respecting Indian hit should.

Everyone acts true to type. Meghnad Bhattacharya (the director) looks the picture of benevolent magnanimity as the stranger, and Swatilekha Sengupta gives a strong performance as the mother. Abhijit Chanda behaves quite despicably as the spineless son.

The only major part that is completely original ? the daughter ? receives fluent portrayal from Indrajita Chakrabartti. As usual, Sayak?s realistic set provides a chief attraction: Uttam De constructs a detailed wooden bungalow typical of hilly terrain with a patch of garden in front.

Somnath Chatterjee?s interior lights supplement the effect.