Kalyani continues to provide fertile ground for new Bengali productions. While Mukhosh’s resident dramatist-director offers another original play, Kalamandalam bases their latest dramatization on Manik Bandyopadhyay.
Ayan Banerjee’s Solver features a Jekyll-and-Hyde split personality in the form of a Ph.D. scholar. A picture of his ordinary middle-class life in the first act changes diametrically into his malefic alter ego surfacing in the second, so disparate as to become almost different plays, with no previous hints of his dark side, and the result that we feel most of his family and friends whom we saw earlier were just red herrings.
I saw Solver before the R. G. Kar horror. In hindsight, the macabre anatomical business that the protagonist’s new boss tempts him into seems quite believable now. Still, Banerjee’s dramaturgical predilection for good-vs-evil polarities needs subtler grey colouring to attain higher realism. He himself performs the boss as a crazed scientist with cartoonish but fearsome flair, whereas Siddhartha Ghosh finds greater scope to develop as the young researcher, and the real madman lurks hidden among the dramatis personae.
In Kalamandalam’s Stri, scripter-director Somnath Gupta intercuts the stories of three wives: a shopkeeper cajoles his wife Sarala to get some capital from her father; a Doll’s House-like domination and even violence on Jhuma, who flirts with another man to make her husband jealous but it backfires; and a thief who wants his wife Kalpana to leave her job as a domestic help and stay at home.
Gupta flits scenes back and forth to keep us guessing about the resolutions till the close, but his device of linking all three plots with a masked (V for Vendetta again, so hackneyed now) man (why not woman?) who functions as a dushtu (the word used in the synopsis) subversive inner voice looks much too forced. Of the three actresses, Jayita Bose (Sarala) and Brishti Sanyal (Kalpana) act much more naturally than Ananya Das (Jhuma), who does not convince with the progress of her fling, and often drops the ends of sentences in her dialogue delivery.
31 August 2024