Original playwriting in English from Calcutta never really took off after Asif Currimbhoy returned to Bombay in the 1970s. Perhaps we could blame the city’s decline in cosmopolitanism since then, for the rest of metro India has definitely seen more activity and improvement on this front. Exceptions here have reached the stage occasionally, making us look forward to more from those authors, but it never happened. We hope that the latest to enter the club persevere with their scriptwriting.

Loreto House has just joined the handful of schools to mount a full-length musical, The Forever Story (picture), the formidable scope of which demands immediate applause. Every single pupil from classes 6 to 12 participated, the cast and crew tallying over 600. Three hundred danced (not all together, thankfully for Kala Mandir) in a spectacular display of terpsichorean talent. A choir of 150 (yes, no typos) belted out the songs from the unusual location of the balcony, supported by a 15-member student orchestra comprising string, keyboard and rhythm sections. The girls made all the scenery and props themselves.

A teacher, Anindita Banerji, composed the libretto, on the age-old good versus evil battle over the human soul, superimposing Milton’s fallen angels upon the trial of a virtuous man in Tolstoy’s The Imp and the Crust. Given her team’s age range, she had to keep the story simple, but we expect all-new and more complex narratives in the future. Her real achievement lay in directing the mammoth production, even though she received professional help from Tito and Shayon Dey (choreography) and Jyoti Shankar Roy (music). She borrowed tunes from pop favourites, but did so tastefully and humorously, epitomized by “The Heat Is On” for the devils in hell. The actors gave their best, and one should not discriminate, but Mephistopheles tempts me to single out Angelina Chakrabarty for sustained performance. The only complaint was that scene changes took longer than they should.

Virtue on a grand scale contrasted with the petty vice depicted by OGLAM’s Beyond Freud in Padatik’s tiny theatre. Based on Freud-inspired poems by Rijita Chatterjee, director Janardan Ghosh devised a text through workshops that presented sordid slices of life involving the moral degradation in five people. Ghosh’s exploration of promiscuity does not scandalize in this day and age, but the storyline does seem scratchy and underdeveloped, with the late inclusion of an important character (the wife) whose perspective we should have heard much earlier. Beyond Freud needs more accomplished scripting, otherwise it reeks of improvisatory self-indulgence, and a message on contemporary sexual licence too obscure to pinpoint.