Celebrating its ruby jubilee, Anya Theatre does not rest on its former laurels but, admirably, notches up its third consecutive 4-star production over the last couple of years. The invited guest directors have based each of these on classic or acclaimed drama in English: Romeo ebang Juliet, Caretaker, and the latest, Aparājitā—which has a very unusual reverse genesis. Normally, when an Indian group selects a foreign text, they transplant it to a local setting. Here, Anya Theatre’s founder Bibhash Chakraborty tossed the idea to director Turna Das of reviving a Bengali original, Nitish Sen’s far-sighted monologue from 1971, but not obligatorily as a solo performance.
Das then had the brainwave of applying Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women (1991) as its structural framework. Like Albee in his Act 2, she split the elderly protagonist’s character among three actresses, each representing a specified age in her life: 92, 52 and 26 years old in Albee. But unlike him, who depicted universal womankind in Act 1 with a young woman as the lady’s lawyer and a middle-aged one her caregiver, and demarcated a change after the interval when all three reflect a single individual at different ages, Das blurs Albee’s clear-cut separation by removing the intermission, making it difficult for us to identify their realities.
Thus, while a septuagenarian Aparajita occupies the centre, her socially-pressured young avatar/legal assistant thinks it crucial to get a job to bolster her independence; and her middle-aged persona/caregiver, having left her violent husband and in-laws for refuge with her brother’s family, looking after his son and all domestic duties, hopes to fulfil her past dreams of performance by acting in a commercial theatre company. We learn that the now-forgetful older lady never did find employment, and lives with that same nephew who may evict her. The superimposition of Albee’s concept on Sen’s soliloquy made its editing a great challenge, which Das has carried off meticulously.
In Tripti Mitra’s centenary year, this Aparājitā resonates of her own unforgettable one-woman show, and under Das’s direction demonstrates how the play retains significance for gender relations today. Krishna Dutta, Sangita Pal and Progya Debnath (in order of seniority) act intensely, though Debnath has an ostensibly smaller part and all three escalate their weeping and wailing simultaneously and unnecessarily in the final half-hour. The tiny, static set of a bed with mosquito net and saris draped surrounding it hems them in almost like a circumscribed cocoon that blocks the emergence of the female butterfly inside.
25 September 2025