Pix by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

The women’s theatre movement in Calcutta marches forward from strength to strength. A significant accomplishment is Rangrup’s Mukhosh Nritya (picture), an original all-women Bengali drama in a men-dominated art that neglects the exclusively-for-actresses genre, and in a field that normally falls back on adaptations. Admittedly, Sima Mukhopadhyay took her idea from Bhagirath Misra’s fictional storyline, but she expanded it to such an extent that her play virtually qualifies as a new artwork.

By fluke, two former college- mates bump into each other near Nandan and decide to surprise a third friend, whom they have not seen in a while, by going to her home. All well-settled, they have travelled different ways in their lives. One is a jhola-carrying industrious feminist, busily moving from seminar to workshop all day long. The second is a lady of leisure, whose husband amply provides for her but womanizes habitually. The two of them visit the third, a housewife happily subservient to her astrologer spouse and unquestioningly parroting his opinions.

The masks of their apparently progressive status and education slip off as their conversation shows how little they have advanced as members of the fair sex, mainly due to marital male chauvinism, but sometimes due to themselves. Like third-wave feminist dramatists abroad, such as Caryl Churchill in the all-women Top Girls, Mukhopadhyay implicitly accuses women of hindering their own progress instead of merely blaming men for all their troubles — the default option of earlier feminists. While they talk, a mini-crisis develops when an older woman brings in a Muslim girl in distress. How do the three friends help her, compared to the older lady and a seemingly nosey housemaid?

With considerable experience in directing actresses, Mukhopadhyay handles the interaction among the six women expertly, though it takes a while for the plot to get going after much initial catching-up between the two buddies at Nandan. Despite the feel-good ending, female activists in the audience may get upset that Mukhopadhyay’s own fine, but subtly negative, characterization of the social worker reflects poorly on them. They should not misunderstand that she is targeting them as a group. Runa Bandyopadhyay and Arunita Roychoudhary enact her friends naturally, while the most unexpectedly rounded performance comes from the unheralded Gopa Nandy as the busybody maid. Chitra Sen (the elder benefactress) and Miska Halim (the battered young girl she has rescued) give excellent support.

One of the pioneers of the all-women play, Federico García Lorca, completed The House of Bernarda Alba just months before his assassination in 1936. Its cast of ten, plus extras, has presented actresses across the world with a classic vehicle for their talents ever since. Popular in Indian theatre also for its thematic relevance, its latest rendering is Theatron’s Bernarda Albar Bari, faithfully translated into Bengali by Salil Bandyopadhyay.

Society’s vice-like grip on women, particularly in the rural world, based on masculine codes of honour (which correspond to Indian concepts of izzat), retains its hold on us today. Trailblazer in many ways, Lorca even anticipated the critique of third-wave feminism on the complicity of women in this system. In this play, the matriarch is depicted as one who furthers female suppression onto the next generation by her draconian regulation of her five daughters. She allies with death as part of the male symbolism of older tradition, crushing the young, female life-force.

The tragedy requires a uniform ensemble performance in order to replicate the “photographic documentation” that Lorca desired. Chaiti Choudhury as Bernarda, and her daughters (Sudeshna Basu, Shukla Roy Mukherjee, Anita Roy, Arundhati Chakraborty and Trina Nileena Banerjee) achieve this. Most intriguingly, the director, Saswati Biswas, manages to bring out an uncanny family resemblance among them, all the more difficult because their dress allows only their faces to remain visible. Instead of camera-like naturalism, Ajit Roy’s set of billowing cloth drapery creates an appropriately spectral aura for the house and its inhabitants.