Among the groups that rehearsed through the lockdown, Shohan not only staged one new play in early 2021 but premiered another towards the end of the year. The productions form a study in contrasting styles and demonstrate the growing strength, abilities and reputation of Shohan and its director, Anish Ghosh.
Bengali theatre has not kept up with the best playwriting in the West in recent decades, resulting in an ignorance about new dramaturgical ways. Ghosh remedies this with Jharer Churoy, a quiet and shimmering adaptation of Christopher Hampton’s The Height of the Storm, translated from Florian Zeller’s French. The young Zeller virtually specializes in drama on dementia, and has won global fame for his film The Father, cinematized from his earlier play.
Unlike in conventional drama, he eschews plotting in Height of the Storm. We really cannot tell what “happens”, almost as if he consciously presents on stage the liminal consciousness of dementia patients. Having lost his own grandmother to Alzheimer’s, he does this with heightened sensitivity, while Ghosh captures Zeller’s techniques with fidelity and refinement. We see a couple married for 50 years, and their two daughters, who seem to be mourning someone’s passing. He, suffering from dementia, lives in his own world of recurring thoughts. His very practical wife evidently holds the household together. The children talk about selling the house, what to do with their father’s library and unpublished papers—all that we all have to do when our parents depart.
But we never know for certain who died, or when. The whole proscenium frame begins to feel like a space where multiple times coexist superimposed, or a picture seen from outside by one who has left the world yet cannot leave, and included themselves in that picture (see photo). Saumya Sengupta, who adapted the drama, and Suranjana Dasgupta enact husband and wife with both delicacy and precision; Sreelata Sen and Madhumita Mukherjee create quite contrasting siblings. A play that lingers in our minds like those incandescent moments from our past that keep returning.
Madhumita Mukherjee herself wrote Rup-krānti, another encouraging sign for Shohan, as a young member steps up to compose an original script, of which we always have a shortfall. At the opposite end of the performing spectrum and more typical of Bengali theatre, Rup-krānti is loud, large-cast and even violent, befitting its story of a Gajan troupe persecuted in their village, moving to Kolkata, and facing further troubles there, culminating in tragedy.
Kajol Shambhu gives a charged-up performance in the lead. Ghosh’s direction spotlights the penury and discrimination that society forces on ordinary rural artists. But one wonders whether the somewhat hopeful conclusion matches the reality of life around us. On music and lights respectively in both productions, Gautam Ghosh and Soumen Chakraborty make a fine supporting team.
5 May 2022