A scene from Betrayal

While the unthinking majority of today’s youth do not look beyond the lobotomised fashions of film and television, a sensitive minority enters theatre and even experiments seriously with it. They may make grievous errors in doing so, but deserve encouragement because they constitute the future of the form.

Making their debut, Reflections chose to stage Harold Pinter’s unique and very difficult play Betrayal, directed by Vivek Bothra. I have commented before that it is better to fail with a classic than succeed with a potboiler.

Betrayal gradually moves backwards in time nine years, so the actors must unravel their characters retrospectively rather than the normal way.

Since we know what happens, the surprises lie in how and why it happened. Here the cast (Bothra, Tathagata Chowdhury and Laura Mishra) fell short technically, more or less projecting fixed characterisations right through.

Bothra also botched up the temporal signposts. In trying to make the play audience-friendly, he had an Italian waiter introduce the locale and year of each scene, taking away the challenge to viewers of working it out for themselves. Careful selection of chart-topping songs could have set the time frame, but Bothra picked random hits of a much later date than the period Pinter specified (1968-77).

Tathagata Chowdhury, himself the leader of another group, Theatrecian, conceptualised, wrote and directed an original presentation for them titled U ... Is That You. It did not come across as entirely original, reminding us a bit too much of Pascal Bruckner’s The Divine Child, brought by Alliance Francaise in 2002 (duly acknowledged by Chowdhury, though, in the flyer).

Here, too, an unborn child decides not to emerge into this cold, mechanical world. The idea, linked with existentialism by Chowdhury, is interesting, but the script needed more time in germination and rehearsal, perhaps through workshops.

Chowdhury, Deborshi Barat and Rajarshi Basu, as the three ages of man, gave the most accomplished performances, while Chowdhury’s lighting design worked the best among the backstage departments.

Students of the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, also got into the act by enthusiastically staging two original one-act plays, subtitled ‘Commentaries on the Contemporary Situation’, at Max Mueller Bhavan. Both were masterminded by final-year theatre activist Ankur Roy Chowdhury.

Not An-Other Story, adapted from a scene in Brecht’s Fear and Misery in the Third Reich, shows fascism insidiously insinuating itself into our community and into one specific family. The second piece, Eclipse: A Tale, lost the subtleties of irony in a very loud and rather jumbled chorus of angry protest. Nevertheless, one hopes this marked the auspicious premiere of public shows of theatrical performances by this pioneering academic programme in India.