Bengali theatregoers have the opportunity at present to compare Mohan Rakesh’s Hindi classics from the 1960s in translation, in productions running concurrently. His third and final completed play before his premature death, Ādhe-adhure, has become Ādhā Adhure in the Shohan version, while his second, Lahron ke Rājhans, turns into Laharir Rājhansa, presented by Sekhar Samaddar for Abhash.
Lahron has a unique association with Kolkata because Rakesh came here at Shyamanand Jalan’s invitation and substantially revised his text, especially the third act, during rehearsals for Anamika in 1967 – a signal collaborative process between author and director at the national level in those days. Sravasti Roy translated the first edition (1963) in Bengali, to which director Samaddar has added material from Rakesh’s definitive second edition of 1968.
The critical cliché about Rakesh’s major works says that they dissect dysfunctional relationships, when in fact he writes about triangles destroying incompatible pairs. Āshādh kā Ek Din deals with Kalidasa, his village love, and the princess he marries. Ādhe-adhure depicts an average middle-class couple and the wife’s impulse to escape with any other man. Lahron revisits Asvaghosha’s poem about the prince of Kapilavastu, Nanda, and his beautiful consort Sundari who worships Kama, while the growing popular appeal of the Buddha looms overhead.
Rakesh posits the Buddha himself, who never makes an appearance, as the third party. The most meaningful interpretation of this situation places Nanda in the centre, pulled between the opposite extremes of the sensual world in Sundari and the spiritual in the Buddha – who, therefore, makes as unreasonable and absolute demands on Nanda as his wife does. I read Nanda’s concluding departure as a conflicted modernist open ending, whereas Samaddar seems to imply that he leaves to join the Sangha along with everyone else in the court.
Samaddar’s emphasis on the “colliding perspectives of the Masculine and the Feminine” simplifies the tension and enters dangerously binary sexual politics, equating man with higher yearning and woman with fleshly desire. Consequently, Samaddar as Nanda and Bindia Ghosh (Sundari) fall into typecast moulds. Nandita Banerji’s erotically-charged choreography deserves mention, but the rest of the mise-en-scene cannot compare with Sanchayan Ghosh’s lush immersive installation for Shyamanand Jalan’s revival at Padatik in 2008.
(From The Times of India, 8 November 2019)