Kolkatans can currently see Bengali productions based on the works of Central European authors, not a very common occurrence. Ganakrishti has of course regularly translated plays by Evald Flisar from Slovenia, and the young group Bodnaam has revived its old dramatization from Kafka to mark his death centenary, an occasion seemingly forgotten by our intels so in awe of the Czech-Austrian master.
Flisar’s psychodrama What about Leonardo? (1992) drew on Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, A. R. Luria’s The Man with a Shattered World, and discussions with a neurologist, to portray an institutionalized patient who cocoons himself in complete amnesia, and how a researcher discovers his phenomenal power to recall anything taught to him, and attempts to re-educate him by instilling information and poetry in him. However, another scientist has different ideas, of capitalizing on his ability by turning him into a strategic asset. The play made an award-winning impact in Slovenia and as far abroad as Indonesia, so it obviously carries weight.
My immediate doubt as an academic watching Amitava Dutta’s adapted Athabā Rabi-thākur lies in the acceptability of a PhD proposal to conduct such a fraught experiment on a human subject. Even thirty years ago, could a European university have considered it ethical? Credibility therefore takes a beating, compounded by the benevolent head of the institute having no control over running it, and the malevolent doctor re-entering the building freely though the inmates vowed to stop him.
Deb Sankar Halder’s hyperactive behaviour and speech have become so deja-vu for lead roles like the one here that his performance fails to convince. In fact, Dutta directs all the patients as visibly not normal, with cultivated bodily tics, which wrongly stereotypes “madness” when we know they are not physically, but neurologically, divergent. Only Shipra Paul acts persuasively as the most uninhibited among them.
Kafka’s short story “A Hunger Artist” is an unquestionable classic of modernist fiction, rooted in the real-life Euro-American Industrial-Revolution entertainment genre of starvation art. Its grotesque absurdity exposes three major themes: society’s callous unconcern for dedicated art (hence the cliché “starving artist”), the fickleness of audiences losing interest in amusements after a while, and the sickening spectre/spectacle of hunger worldwide. If you haven’t read it, you must; it takes only ten minutes of your precious time.
Suffused with good intentions, Bodnaam’s The Hunger Artist disappoints by digressing too much from the man who fasts to earn his living. Kafka balanced the artist’s agent equally from impresario to circus manager, but scripter-director Abhishek Roy Karmakar’s focus on the circus, its capitalist manager, his parties and lust, the dinner leftovers eaten by the underlings, the entire cast moving about quite randomly, distracts from Anuprobho Bhaduri’s agonized performance as the scrawny, forlorn, caged artist. Stripped of its trappings and inspired by Beckettian minimalism instead, The Hunger Artist would shock as street theatre, in which Bodnaam has substantial experience.
25 July 2024