Continuing active theatre well into his eighties, Ashok Mukhopadhyay does a star turn as the hero in Theatre Workshop’s Great Bengal Theatre and directs Nirbak Abhinay Academy’s Saodāgarer Naukā simultaneously, demonstrating remarkable energy. The metatheatrical dimension of both plays probably enthused him even more.
The celebration of Bengali professional theatre’s sesquicentenary has resulted in revivals as well as originals set within the historical context of the commercial stage. Among the latter, Great Bengal Theatre joins Nat-ranga’s Chhāyāpather Sheshe as both thoughtful and entertaining. Dramatist-director Sumitro Bandyopadhyay likes research, which gives him plentiful material here, alongside inspiration from Tiner Taloyār. He fictionalizes the Great Bengal Theatre as a woebegone company during the time of the Partition of Bengal, but with a recognizable personnel of proprietors, playwrights, patrons, performers and prostitutes-turned-actresses, and familiar anecdotes of organizational hassles: monetary crises, legal complications, colonial surveillance.
In these stressful conditions, the play opens with the actor-manager (Mukhopadhyay), an erstwhile colleague of Girish Chandra Ghosh, rendered speechless—a seriocomic tone that Bandyopadhyay sustains laudably throughout. The company do their utmost to lift his spirits and to score a financial hit somehow. The near-death blow comes with one of those typical fires that burnt down theatres (though we must ask, how did they rebuild it so fast?). Mukhopadhyay’s wonderful insouciance leads up to Bandyopadhyay’s dramatic ace, fulfilling his dream of enacting King Lear in an uplifting reunion with his Cordelia (photo). I hold back the surprise. Theatre Workshop’s full team merits an ovation for evoking the past milieu.
Mukhopadhyay must have considered directing Saodāgarer Naukā as his homage to his senior colleague in Nandikar, Ajitesh Bandopadhyay, the dramatist. One of Bandopadhyay’s few original scripts, it tells the tale of a former Jatra actor once famous as Chand Saodagar, now old and living at home, who hears the call of touring once again. Bandopadhyay wrote it in 1966 when hardly anyone gave due respect to Jatra artists. Has that social attitude returned today?
A long text, it receives tight editing from Mukhopadhyay, who chops the flab but in doing so, exposes the relatively straightforward storyline, very simple from a contemporary perspective. The outcome does not differ substantially from Sansriti’s version in 2016 (see my review).
Compared to that production, however, the performers here take the honours. Soumitra Basu imparts to the wronged actor Prasanna an authenticity (contrasted to Deb Sankar Halder’s melodrama for Sansriti), coupled with self-dignity restored when the offer comes to join the troupe. Suranjana Dasgupta complements him as his loving wife, deeply worried for him travelling at his advanced age but aware that he must do what only he can do. Their bellicose son (Anirban Das), his warm girlfriend (Mauli Ray) and Prasanna’s female-impersonator comrade (Suman Pal) round off a believable picture.
30 July 2024