With Je Janlagulor Akash Chhilo, Ichheymoto has notched a clear winner in terms of being received with great enthusiasm by the audience, which came in droves to pack the Academy of Fine Arts auditorium to the rafters on the day this reviewer watched the play. It was the second show of the play, though it could have actually been the third had a previous show scheduled at a venue owned by the Kolkata Municipal Corporation not been suddenly cancelled, presumably to accommodate a government event. Such cancellations, admittedly within the agreed upon terms and conditions of renting government/semi-government auditoria, plunge impacted theatre groups into serious distress (for reasons too many to enumerate in this review); the authorities should be urged to not press the ‘cancel’ button facilely, but rather to explore means (again, impossible to list here) of protecting the interests of all parties involved.

Dramatised by Saurav Palodhi from stories written by Rahul Arunoday Banerjee, Je Janlagulor… has a simple, familiar narrative core — four very close young friends grow up, life happens, differences splinter them apart, and they begin to chart their own divergent adulthoods. The familiar simplicity is a masterstroke as it allows spontaneous audience connection; members of the audience readily insert their own stories into the folds of the plot. In fact, Palodhi has engineered the play with the intention of drawing the audience into every twist and turn of the plot, a strategy to which the audience has responded with loud cheers of approval and equally boisterous clapping throu­­ghout the run of the play. If Palodhi has perceptively served as thematic content nostalgia and stories of fractured friendships (always satisfying to the Bengali cultural imagination), his chosen form of presenting the content bears ample proof of his mastery over stagecraft, scene construction, and creation of magically effectual theatrical moments. Within a performance loaded with much skill from various artists, Debdeep Mukherjee’s richly layered music, Soumen Chakraborty’s brilliant sepia-dominated light design, and Buddhadeb Das’s superlative acting deserve special mention.