Nandipat’s Narir Mancha this year spotlighted productions by women directors, as many as eleven of them. Among these, the two of longest duration dealt with cataclysmic traumas affecting humanity, not just women.
Sobar Poth (their registered spelling, equivalent to Bangla Sabār Path) evolves with Khat, which director Sanjita dramatized from the works of Manto, Subodh Das and Krishan Chander. Unlike most writers of plays based on such sources, presented as separate one-act playlets, Sanjita stitches them seamlessly into one fabric without breaks. While Manto and Krishan Chander have enjoyed so many Hindi or Urdu dramatizations that we remember their major texts almost by heart, Bengali audiences have not had this benefit, so Sanjita provides them another service, too.
She scripts them as testamentary writings by women on their sexual abuse during interreligious violence, documented in letters or notebooks that we read much later. The well-known Manto section occurs in a Partition refugee camp in 1948; Subodh Das’s account, of a Bangladeshi trafficked to Sonagachhi during the Bhasha Andolan; and Krishan Chander’s little-dramatized but horrifying story Ek Tawāif kā Khat (also from 1948), of a Hindu girl from Rawalpindi and a Muslim girl from Jalandhar taken to the Foras Road red-light area in Bombay. At the conclusion, a sari unfurls revealing the painted words, that the Earth is not partitioned.
The male actors perform just as well as the actresses, except for the rather stereotypical emotionally-overwhelmed Bengali writer in Sonagachhi. Sanjita (seen in the photo, acting) directs with raw feminist-humanist power, the episodes appropriately lit with careful demarcation by Triguna Shankar Manna.
During the pandemic, sales of Camus’ The Plague soared. In the theatre it became an obvious choice for dramatization, fulfilled in Kolkata by Sejuti Bagchi as Uhinee’s The Plague—a fight against, in Bengali. She and co-author Saheli Saha do not adapt, but keep the original time and place, the Algerian town of Oran in 1940, and most of the plot and characters. External comments from a man in our midst clarify the parallels with Covid-19, initial denial of it, subsequent devastation, and post-pandemic return to human selfishness.
On stage, however, Bagchi’s direction leaves the scenes looking comparatively static. She does not capitalize on the passage in the novel that contains maximum theatrical potential, where Cottard and Tarrou go to see the opera Orpheus and Eurydice, at which the performer of Orpheus’ part collapses and dies presumably of the plague. Nevertheless, we should credit Uhinee for attempting this existentialist classic.
31 March 2022