Among the nine finalists for the seventh Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards held in Delhi this month, two were nominated from Bengal — Arghya’s Journey to Dakghar (already reviewed in these columns) and Rangasram’s Santap (from Murshidabad) — but only one of the others had come to Calcutta previously, Prime Time Theatre’s Adhe Adhure in Hindi, invited by Sangit Kala Mandir recently.

At a time when clever revisions or deconstructions of texts on stage have become the rule, we feel thankful on the rare occasions that a director presents a dramatic classic relatively straight. In their quest for novelty, theatre artists forget the value of powerful conversations composed by the best playwrights, which hardly need ornamentation, much less tampering with. Lillete Dubey accords this respect to Mohan Rakesh’s masterpiece of middle-class marital breakdown, setting it in the original 1969 and letting it speak for itself.

Thus, because Rakesh himself does not betray whose case he supports — whether he feels that all men exploit women, or that his heroine, Savitri, demands far too much from her husband, Mahendra — Dubey too leaves the ambivalence open for us to ponder. Lesser directors would have stressed one or the other option.

Dubey won META’s Best Actress award on Wednesday, but it seemed to me that her double duty in direction and acting adversely affected the latter. This has happened with her before, in Prime Time. A very strong performer, she gives her finest when directed by someone else. On her own, she often misses out on the subtleties that she can easily layer onto her role.

Mohan Agashe had a more difficult task, because Rakesh wants one actor to play five parts: the opening prologue plus the four men in Savitri’s life. So Agashe had to differentiate among them with suitably distinguishing characteristics as well as suggest their basic similarity. He managed this tightrope walk creditably, and won our sympathy as the henpecked Mahendra.

The children received portrayals somewhat divergent from Rakesh’s instructions. The eldest, the son expressing “bitterness” (Rajeev Siddhartha), behaved younger than the older daughter (Ira Dubey), who lacked a “completely shattered” personality, just as the youngest sibling (Anuschka Sawhney) lacked “revolt in everything”. For the set, Bhola Sharma rightly used torn cloth hangings and furniture that had seen better times, with a leafless tree in the courtyard behind that symbolized the death of the family.