While the state continues to gear up for Manik Bandyopadhyay’s17edilal birth centenary festivities, Bengali theatre has already paid its tribute by staging his two best novels, Putul Nacher Itikatha and Padma Nadir Majhi, running to appreciative audiences. Given that no play can hope to encompass every important episode in a novel, the respective dramatizations by Arun Mukhopadhyay and Alok Deb — directors of Chetana and Pratikriti — do justice to the depiction of stifling social structures and overbearing destiny in Bandyopadhyay’s rural stories, both dating to 1936.

The idealistic doctor, Shashi, in Putul Nacher Itikatha (picture) gradually finds himself hemmed in from all quarters, to the extent that he cannot concentrate on treating his villagers any more and feels that he must escape this mentally unhealthy atmosphere. His family gives him the most pain — his father’s wealth accumulated through various misdeeds, and his sister in Calcutta morally corrupted by a vile husband and his friends.

Biplab Bandyopadhyay quietly brings out Shashi’s initial naïvete, growing frustration and ultimate despondency. Effective portrayals also come from Manisha Adak as the volatile Kusum infatuated with Shashi, Sangita Pal as his sister addicted to the good life, and Arun Mukhopadhyay himself as Jadab, the Brahmin who wills himself to death (in fact, commits suicide) to prove his spiritual prowess.

All the secondary characters receive fine delineation too. Mukhopadhyay remains particularly faithful to Bandyopadhyay’s diction in both dialogues and descriptive passages, but he should pay a little more attention to scenography: we felt the absence of a genuine set designer.

Padma Nadir Majhi appears a much more difficult proposition for the theatre because of its riverine canvas, but Alok Deb marshals Pratikriti into a large-scale production conveying the elemental doom that befalls the fisherman Kuber and others of his community suffering from their individual vices, from society, and from nature — the Padma that gives as well as takes away. Shyamal Sarkar creates a robust Kuber with a booming voice, despite his faults almost heroic in never surrendering against all adversities, even in the end when he must place himself at the mercy of the equivocal Hosen Miyan, who traffics people to his supposedly utopian but hellish estuarine island, Maynadwip.

Deb stitches his drama together with a kathak narrator, Partha Pratim Deb, often singing powerfully. Most creditably, he coaches the entire cast in the specific riparian dialect that made the source such a trendsetter — the first Bengali novel to employ dialect extensively. The verisimilitude covers not just pronunciation and vocabulary but also the sheer decibel volume of their speech. To suggest the realistic setting, Manu Datta erects an impressive jetty and hut on stage.

Rangakarmee’s latest also dramatizes another Bengali novel on the subjugation of the lowest rural classes, the more recent Sri Ganesh Mahima (1981) by Mahasweta Devi. Scripted by Koushik Chattopadhyay from the original and translated into Hindi by Dilip Bharti, it is conceptualized by Usha Ganguli but directed by Partha Bandyopadhyay in consonance with Ganguli’s policy to encourage new ventures by a young guard. Bandyopadhyay’s style, however, applies the Rangakarmee patent dutifully: highly-charged passion, loud and in-your-face physicality including violence, a packed, well-orchestrated mise en scène, and rapid scene changes.

Sri Ganesh Mahima takes place in Bihar, where a local zamindar rejoices in the birth of a son though his wife dies during labour. He picks a young lower-caste girl to take her place as mother as well as his sexual partner — another form of bonded slavery — but never releases her even after the boy, Ganesh, grows up. As an adult, the son terrorizes the village even more than his father did, not sparing his own foster-mother. Pawns in his hands, the police and administration can do nothing to change the situation. A supreme act of rebellion concludes the play, symbolizing the overthrow of the feudal tyranny that still exists.

The performance to look out for is Senjuti Roy Mukherjee’s as the girl, moving from the innocent, exploited maiden to the deliverer of the villagers from evil. Dilip Bharti plays Ganesh, but it is relatively easier to enact overt villainy. Mahasweta Devi’s activist message to resist oppression cannot be faulted, yet the conflict is pure black-versus-white, too simplistic to create ultimately lasting theatre, even if necessary to rouse awareness.