With Passing Show, Sayak completes a trilogy of dramatizations from Amar Mitra’s stories, by three different playwrights. It began with the urban domestic realism of Pinki Buli, followed by last year’s rural but symbolic tale of women’s empowerment, Dāmini-he, by Indrashis Laharry and Chandan Sen respectively. But Passing Show raises the stakes because Ujjwal Chattopadhyay has written it in a more complex style, flitting back and forth in time and memory as well as demanding certain surreal touches that bring it close to a dream in places. These techniques also create a script less prone to flights of melodrama, for which Sayak has always proven a special expertise. By minimizing this risk, Chattopadhyay frees director Meghnad Bhattacharya to plumb the inherent depth of acting available within the group.
Like many in this city, the hero Atin loves the past, family history and his heritage. His father used to compose songs, only one of which made it on to a record, and the son grows obsessed with locating that 78 rpm disc, because his ancestral abode no longer has a copy. His quest leads him to a music dealer and connoisseur, Ghulam, an encyclopedic storehouse of information, yet simultaneously an otherworldly character who tosses clues in Atin’s direction and insists that nothing is irretrievable, even though it may seem lost forever. I can name any number of Kolkatans – bibliophiles, audiophiles, art collectors, architecture admirers, even film fanatics – who fit the descriptions of Atin and Ghulam, giving this study in contrasts of fragility and permanence an immediate value to us.
At home, Atin receives zero support, since his family thinks of him as slightly off the wall and wants to demolish their house to erect an apartment building that promises both capital assets and modern living. But he says that he senses his father’s presence in the veranda. Meanwhile Ghulam magically invokes old friends of Atin who reappear after decades. So the various ghosts are difficult to dislodge. Only one of them, a British colonial officer who fell for a local courtesan and then sailed back, strikes me as not quite essential to the play. Bhattacharya himself delivers a richly nuanced portrait of Atin virtually existing in a time warp, complemented by excellent contributions from the over twenty-strong dramatis personae, notably Samiran Bhattacharyya as Ghulam.
Another production about the pressures of one’s past, Shilpi Sangha’s Judhishthir Bābu, has been dramatized by Tirthankar Chanda from Pracheta Gupta’s story, “Jādab Bābu Mithye Balen Nā”. In it, a respected senior citizen whose reputation rests on the bedrock that he never speaks a lie, at a heated moment blurts out an untruth about his examination scores as a child to a boy who comes to him for help with studies. This impulsive utterance starts to haunt the man, to the extent that he questions his own integrity. Gupta examines the concept of falsehood itself, and whether a white lie can qualify ethically as a greater truth in special cases.
While no doubt well-intentioned, the entire superstructure collapses owing to a fundamental flaw in plausibility. The protagonist may have spontaneously said something that went against his high principles and pricked his conscience. But that should not have prevented such an intelligent man from calling back the boy either the same day or later, and correcting the error by confiding honestly what had really happened in his schooldays. If he had done that, as indeed we think he should have in terms of the credibility of his characterization, there would not have been either a story or a play.
Apart from having overlooked this built-in self-destruct programme, Sima Mukhopadhyay does a competent job as director. Of course, with an actor like Bimal Chakraborty in the lead, one can sit back anyway, assured of a good performance. Opposite him, Arundhati Pal Choudhury humours his eccentricity, and the others join in giving him the necessary support.
(From The Telegraph, 27 August 2016)