“Gargee dnaralei panchash!” Roughly translated as “Gargee’s stage entry means 50 per cent of the work has been achieved,” this statement by one of Gargee Roychowdhury’s mentors at Bohurupee — overheard by this reviewer many years back — kept coming back to me as I watched Tara Sundari. Produced by Theatre Plus, Tara Sundari premiered on November 1 at G.D. Birla Sabhaghar. I was under the impression that this would be another play along the lines of those on Binodini Dasi, Gauhar Jaan and would, once again, shed light on the rigmarole of the late-19th-century entertainment industry in Calcutta. Solo acts are the flavour of the season, and Tara Sundari — hitherto sidelined by the brouhaha surrounding Binodini — would get some stage time. Roychowdhury’s performance that evening laid many reservations to rest.
Written and directed by Ujjwal Chattopadhyay, who relies heavily on Upendranath Vidyabhushan’s 1920 book, Tinkari, Binodini o Tarasundari, during scripting, Tara Sundari is a pleasure ride back to the glory days of Bengali professional theatre in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, to the era marked by babus, their craving for entertainment, and the generation of artists who provided it on stage. This 80-minute show is enhanced by Prabuddha Banerjee’s understanding of Bengali theatre music, Abhisek Roy’s crafty recreation of period costumes, and Soumen Chakraborty’s precision with lighting.
Chattopadhyay’s episodic pattern jars at times but who cares when he has an actor at his disposal who can breathe life into cult stage roles like Shoibalini from Chandrashekhar and Rizia from Rizia by mouthing dialogues from those plays and singing and dancing when called for. Roychowdhury plays more than a dozen such parts as she weaves Tara Sundari’s life and stage career together. Her delivery remains sharp — sharper than many younger contemporaries — and her expressions are mostly adequate — although there is room for a more layered portrayal. Her stage presence is as charming as when she played Shrimati in Bohurupee’s Piriti Param Nidhi (1994), the play which launched
her career.
