Anya Theatre has of late invited guest directors for its new productions: Debasish Ray, and now Arindam Mukherjee’s Topi. Mukherjee first wrote Topi in the late 1990s as a one-act, then expanded it into its present form twelve years ago, which he has finally staged after several hiccups and the sudden demise of original cast member Prasenjit Bardhan.
One of Bengali theatre’s most cosmopolitan directors with a wide reading of contemporary texts, Mukherjee acknowledges Dorothy Parker and Roald Dahl for two short stories that each provided a strand of influence here. But to me, his snapshot tale of two men striving to make it in Mumbai (another indicator of Mukherjee’s cosmopolitan thought processes) and their grand designs seems an intriguing cross of the clowns in Nayan Kabirer Pālā meeting David Mamet’s American Buffalo, where two poker buddies talk and plan a heist that never gets off the ground.
Mukherjee’s duo, named Reza and Naba, discuss among other things the differences between Allah and Krishna—a potentially stimulating conversation that he does not develop like it could have, let us say, in the hands of a Tom Stoppard. As in typically absurdist drama, we don’t get much exposition or closure, though another area that Mukherjee could productively reveal is what work his Didi-Gogo do before engineering their get-rich-quick scheme. Either way, I miss the philosophical forays (whether existentialist or not) found in the best absurdist dialogue. In the plethora of world drama that treads Beckett’s footsteps, Topi could grab us more if its characters dug deeper into their cerebral and emotional psyches.
The experienced actors, Pratik Dutta and Tathagata Chaudhuri, portray consummately their respective distinctive and opposed traits of leader and follower, brains and feelings. However, Shankha Bandyopadhyay’s set looks much too sophisticated for a Dharavi address.
5 December 2022