Mangolik, one of the many theatre groups of Calcutta to have survived for decades, has come up with its latest production, Khuror Kismat. Taking cue from a story by Syed Mustafa Siraj, Soumya Biswas has written the play with the veteran Samir Biswas, the doyen of Mangolik, shouldering directorial responsibility. Both the playwright and the director are also actors in the play. The cast comprises Mangolik’s members, both young and old.

Minutes into the play, one is gripped by a strange and uneasy sensation of
having moved back in time by at least four decades. The sense of being caught in a time warp persists throughout. There is nothing — neither the sluggish opening, the laboured middle, nor the insipid end — that acts to dispel the feeling that Khuror Kismat is anachronistic and dated. Take the plot, for instance. A renowned teacher, a resident of a village, has passed away in the city and his funeral rites, his son confirms, have been taken care of in that distant location. The villagers suffer at the hands of the legislator and the panchayat pradhan and their henchmen. The crux of the narrative is the appearance of the ghost of the dead teacher who returns to punish the villains. It is revealed, quite predictably, that the teacher was never dead and the spectral visitations were a ruse to frighten the bad men to change their evil ways. As is evident from this skeletal summary, the plot is hackneyed and stale. The characters are caricatures and are either black or white with
no shade of credibility-inducing grey.

If the plot is infirm, so is the acting. All the actors choose to loudly overact, presumably having been directorially instructed to wage continuous war against subtlety in any form or shape. Mangolik should wise up to the reality that the structure, language and communication of theatre today have changed and that embracing change is proof of being alive.