Among the handful of Urdu productions coming out of Kolkata, two currently running ones emanate from longstanding Hindi groups, both of which use familiar modern classics as their sources.
For Proscenium’s Begum Jāni ki Haveli, director Anjum Rizvi adapts Garcia Lorca’s House of Bernarda Alba, inspired by Govind Nihalani’s cinematization, Rukmāvati ki Haveli. Many theatre groups have Indianized it, because it speaks so well to the stifling conditions of women here. Rizvi locates it in Uttar Pradesh, with an eye-catching box set of a haveli designed by Koushik Chatterjee, but diffuses the tragic atmosphere by compressing the original to 90 minutes and deleting one character. Most unwisely, he inserts a manservant into the cast, defeating Lorca’s purpose in creating one of the world’s first all-women plays. On the positive side, all the eight actresses perform creditably, avoiding the soft option of melodrama, persuading me to suggest: why doesn’t this team take up our even earlier home-grown all-women drama, Tagore’s Natir Puja, so politically appropriate today?
Although Renaissance’s Tobā Tek Singh premiered in 2021, they have had the opportunity to stage it only a dozen times since, and invited me to their latest one. Pretty much everybody knows Manto’s short story, and umpteen dramatizations have passed our way. Despite the title, Rajesh Kumar’s Hindustani script does not restrict itself to the story, but incorporates salient extracts from Manto’s letters and memories as well as his other stories like “Khol Do” (a method we have seen in other productions, too). His distinction lies in showing how Manto and Toba shared the same incredulous thought about their post-Partition homes and where these lay: in India or Pakistan? Director Aloke Chakravorty transforms this monologue for a solo actor into a powerful three-hander, in which Avinash Gupta, Praveen Kumar Sharma and Kamal Mishra perform equally well interchanging all the roles, on Sumit Mitra’s jigsaw-puzzle set symbolizing absurdity.
23 April 2025