The trauma experienced by refugees, local and worldwide, forms the theme of two solo productions. East Side Stories, about both Bengals post-partition, inaugurated the newest performance venue in our city short of such spaces, the Janus Centre for Visual and Performing Arts in Park Circus. It consists of a 50-seater intimate theatre – literally named Black Box – fitted with all the apparatus and facilities required in performing arts, including lights, sound, wings and dressing rooms, evidently showing the careful touch of the founders, Mahmud Alam and Sanchayita Bhattacharjee, themselves actors. It should provide an ideal home for work on a small scale, whether theatre, dance, music, poetry reading or experimentalia.
Mahmud directs Sanchayita in East Side Stories, a set of three Bengali short stories dramatized in English translation. For Dibyendu Palit’s Alamer Nijer Bāri, on a house exchange after Independence, they switch the male protagonist to a woman so that Sanchayita can enact her. But because Palit incorporated a great deal more than just the averted relationship at its core, the brevity of this rendition leaves us feeling unfulfilled. However, Sanchayita achieves unqualified success in the next two playlets, of Selina Hossain’s Gāyatri Sandhyā (titled Pratik/Symbol) and Manik Bandyopadhyay’s The Final Solution.
In Pratik, a Muslim husband and his pregnant Hindu wife leave West Bengal for East Pakistan. She gives birth soon after they cross the border, and names their son Pratik as a symbol of hope for the future. In Final Solution, a refugee family arrives in Calcutta and begins living at a railway station, where so-called social workers prey on the mother as they do other vulnerable women. She seems to have no choice, until she takes a decisive step at the end. Sanchayita expresses the helplessness, terror as well as agency in these characters. She intends to do a Bengali version using three different dialects; I also suggest that she expand each script, for an extra half-hour allows for adoption of more nuances from the source texts.
As part of British Council’s “Wales in Kolkata”, Theatr Iolo presented Transporter, in which a teenage girl significantly named Maya must move from place to place in search of an illusory home. Through her, writer-narrator Catherine Dyson and director Andy Smith segue multiple international stories of migration, dispossession, displacement, trafficking and warfare, one after another. With minimal acting by Dyson, who stood more or less in one position throughout, Transporter constitutes storytelling rather than theatre. Indian storytellers should note how their Western counterparts do not sugarcoat tales for young adults, but tell them reality like it is, in Theatr Iolo’s words, “to help them make sense of the world”.
(From The Times of India, 1 February 2019)