TWO TAGORE PLAYS REVISITED

TWO TAGORE PLAYS REVISITED

The plays by Tagore that have been staged by different groups on the occasion of his 150 birth anniversary can broadly be distinguished into two main categories of productions. One type undertook to present the plays with very little editing or modifications. Here, one finds that, there is an effort not to venture or to drift away from the original form or for that matter from the original structure. The other group preferred to go their own way and try to bring in the so called modern outlook and a contemporary perspective to the pieces. These efforts, one sadly finds, in the name of experiments were solely aimed with a hidden agenda to project the director’s ingeniousness, rather than heed to what Tagore had conceived. It seemed to satisfy the urge of crossing the limit and there by ‘be different’ as the ketchup company advertises. These productions have not done any good to the Bengali stage as these so called experiments have obscured Tagore to such a point that one may find him go missing at times. The point that has been overlooked in the excitement of ‘deconstructing’ Tagore is that Tagore, himself, had not gone in for experimenting or compromising on his own works when he found that he was not getting what he had wanted for staging the play. This was seen in the case of Raktakarabi which he did not go in for staging at all.

Here, some may argue that Tagore plays need to be edited and revised or else Tagore would remain in the dungeon of the past and would fail to relate to the present times and the present situations around us. Of course innovative adaption, as Natyacharya Shombhu Mitra in 1978 had commented in one of his letters to the then Vice Chancellor of Visva-Bharati, needs to be done to make the presentation ‘meaningful’ to today’s viewers. By ‘meaningful’ he meant to present the play by bridging the distance of the time Tagore wrote his plays and the present time, which would give the viewer an unambiguous view of the playwright’s concept. He had practically showed the world how this could be done in his Bohurupi production of Raktakarabi.

Let us revisit two different productions of Tagore’s plays which would amply illustrate the conjecture made in the above lines. Both the two productions, namely, Jogajog produced by Paschimbanga Natya Akademi and Raktakarabi by Purba Paschim, have been handled by experienced directors and both have had a good star-cast. Of the two the former one did not have many shows as it is a state government regulated production and so frequent staging are not possible for obvious reasons. Further, it was a production that went rolling in the last few months of the erstwhile regime and was staged a few times during that period. It has not been staged, perhaps, since the new government had taken charge and the new policymakers have not indicated as yet of any prospects of it being staged in the near future. But frankly speaking this play should be presented more often for it is a production that carries the rare charm of watching a Tagore play – a charm that the Bengali theatre goers had experienced a few decades back in the Bohurupi productions.

Ashok Mukherjee kept to the original play that was scripted by Tagore himself. As the dramaturgy was done by Tagore himself after the original novel was published in 1929 and as the production kept to the original, it gives the viewers an opportunity to witness the novel, so to say, being enacted in the two and a half hour duration presentation. The finer shades of the characters and the hints and nuances that their dialogues convey can be perceived more lucidly than the written words would portray to the uninitiated readers. When Kumu tells Biprodas, ‘‘there are certain things that cannot be lost even for one’s son’’ (Blogger’s translation) referring to her dignity and self esteem, when Biprodas reminds her that she cannot abandon Madhusudan as her son’s future was at stake, becomes more poignant than the written words in the novel though the words remain same. Humbly, I would like to ask those who think that Tagore has to be ‘updated’ in order to be accepted by the so-called modern minds, that are we ready to accept such striking dialogues which would put the so-called modern minds look puritans of the of the medieval time.

The characters are presented keeping their distinctive personalities as Tagore had constructed them in his novel. This is facilitated by keeping the individual dialogues as written in the play unaltered. This in turn helps in the smooth progression of the play on the stage. One of the striking features of a Tagore work is the sparing use of words be it in a description or a dialogue. This feature has been imaginatively transcreated on the stage by the director and it is no easy job. One may think that such a difficult task might be a big reason why such productions have not been seen for a long long time on the Bengali stage. This aspect of handling Tagore is worth learning by the students of theatre. The viewers are enthralled at the deftness with which the characters are analysed in the limitations of the stage.  Another aspect of the production is worth a mention. The scenic value or the viewing perspective of each scene of the production is of a high standard. Every scene is so well designed that the viewing of the scenes which are always charged with the psychological conflicts between the characters never tends to fall below the desired tension level, and the viewers are carried smoothly to the end.

While Jogajog again proved that you do not require Tagore to be ‘updated’ and a stunningly attractive stage production can be presented keeping to the original script, the second play that is being revisited, Raktakarabi by Purba Paschim, stands in stark contrast. It mutates Tagore’s original play into a form which is not only unrecognisable but also a visual sore, to say the least, though lavish production cost is evident in every department of the production. This play was drafted ten times by Tagore and he changed the title of the play three times. All these changes and modifications he made were not results of banal whims or eccentricities that one might believe.  He did have reasons for all these changes which definitely indicate the evolution of his basic concept of the play which is the conflict of two civilisations, the agricultural and the industrial.  It has been more than eighty years now that this drama which remains as modern and as contemporary as any play penned by today’s playwrights, both in content and form, is being discussed and studied in the field of world theatre. As the content has a political undertone and the structure has a symbolic form which requires a lot of cerebral exercise in application, the staging of the play has been a great challenge for any theatre worker. Not many productions either in Bengali or in other regional language or for that matter in English which Tagore himself had translated as The Red Oleanders are recorded that are worth mentioning. Incidentally, this is the only play of Tagore which he himself never staged during his lifetime. Some fifty years ago the only production which is still discussed today and is acknowledged as the first modern drama staged in India was that of Bohurupi. Lately, a few groups have ventured to stage this play in their own styles. But in each of these productions instead of manifesting the Tagore work the director’s interpretation is highlighted. The latest and the most ugly of this exhibition of blatant egoism were seen in Purba Paschim’s production. Elaborate media coverage was arranged so that a euphoria could be raised and a drive made to have more viewers. The background music score was done by the sons of Ustad Amjad Ali Khan. This might have helped in the box-office returns but contributed very little for the play itself.

The filmmaker Gautam Halder has directed this play with a lot of editing in the form of additions to the script. These additions are far away from what Tagore had conceived while writing this play.  No one would have complained at this impudent trespassing on Tagore’s work if the title had been something else than what the original play had or if it were mentioned that it was an adaptation of the original play. Instead what the viewers were subjected to in the name of Tagore clearly infringes on the aesthetics of theatre viewing. To illustrate the preposterous changes that devastated the play and failed the production, a few can be mentioned. Instead of the lyrical opening scene of Kishor calling out at Nandini there were people with guns pointing at the auditorium. The last scene showed a dead Nandini being brought to lie beside Ranjan instead of Tagore’s way of finishing the play where her image of freedom and deliverance defies the suggestion of her mortal death. Showing the mortal remains of Nandini simply shows that the poor director missed the basic concept of the drama. The all powerful King is seen to have multiple hands and the literal manifestation of his being as old as the frog was done by someone dressed as a frog leaping across the proscenium, and the King wearing a pair of goggles to depict Nendini’s assertion that his vision is barred. 

It would not be impertinent to recapitulate what Utpal Dutt had to say about Raktakarabi. He had said that Raktakarabi had reached for the basic question of the modern society and that Rabindranath has pulled at the very foundation of today’s life. Dutt says that whenever he tried to find out the similarities with the present system he found Raktakarabi had transcended to a higher lyrical world. To him Raktakarabi though is of the modern times has but an eternal appeal.

                Before signing off I would like to remind the readers what Tagore had to say regarding the crisis depicted in his Raktakarabi. He said that, there in nothing called the crisis or predicament of the present times; the entire crisis faced by man is eternal. And so as long as oppression, deprivation, tyranny of the so-called civilized world stays, Tagore believed, the protesting voice of man would be raised. So, it would only spoil the play if ‘politics’ is additionally injected into the body of the play. What was required was objectivity on the part of the director which was sadly missing in the production under the scanner.