Akdin Mandire Jaoar Pathe: An outstanding production of
Sansriti
Satish
Alekar’s Marathi drama Ek Divas Mathakade has been adapted into a very
powerful Bengali version by Debesh Chatterjee for his group Sansriti. He has
fittingly given it a Bengali name – Akdin Mandire Jaoar Pathe.
Before I go into the details of my observations of the work, I would like to
recollect what the British Theatre theoretician and a practitioner Brian Way
had said to distinguish theatre from drama, that theatre is a communication
between the actors and an audience. Theatre connects the viewer with the actor,
or rather it should be the other way round, the actor with the viewer.
Therefore, as the actor actively makes the theatre to happen and to reach out
to the viewer, the viewer too should have the onus to be equally active to
receive what the actor is transmitting, in order to make the theatre happen. At
the Academy of Fine Arts where I had gone to see the Sansriti production on a
February day I was a bit surprised to see a very poor attendance of viewers.
Seeing the work, it was clear that this was not the regular run-of-the-mill
type play. It was of a different class. Was this the reason for the meager
attendance?
According
to the play-maker Debesh, this happened to be the fifth staging in these last
three years of its premiere. One wonders that this is in spite of the fact that
the production has one of the stalwarts of the present Bengali stage, Meghnad
Bhattacharya in the lead role, one of the promising young talents Arna
Mukherjee in a supporting role, the renowned artist Sanchayan Ghosh’s stage installation,
the outstanding light artist Sudip Sanyal’s light designs, and one of the best
music directors of the present time Abhijit Acharya’s background scoring. And
to top it all the total work of scenography and making of the play was in the
hands of Debesh Chatterjee. It can simply be said that each and every
department of the production was so well orchestrated that this production can
be sited as a bright example of perfection in theatre-making.
Another
feature of this production is that it remains as a rarest of the rare examples
of the viewers experiencing a ‘beyond drama’ effect after the end of the play.
So, the question remains, why is this apathy and reluctance amongst the
viewers? Is there any dearth of communication?
This
requires an in-depth analysis.
The
narrative of Satish does not have a story-line of the sort. Basically, it is a
long almost never-ending dialogue of an aged man. A young man and a woman
appear as if to complement the very existence of the aged man. One may question
that whether these two characters – the youth and the woman have any existence
of their own? The aged and the young man may or may not be father and son. But
there is a common bereavement sort of that affects their lives. The aged is a
widower and the young man has lost his mother. Both of them seem to have
undertaken a journey to overcome the vacuum in their lives created by a death.
The
interior monologue of the old man which is like a stream-of-consciousness
compels the spectator to reject the absolute value and have faith on the
delusion of resolute truth and to sought out the relative truth. This is where
modernism traverses into the realm of post-modernism. And hence the viewer has
to be ready and conscious to imbibe the monologue. If one tries to literally
decipher the meaning of the individual words of the dialogue one may take it to
be a delirium sort of, of a widower. Meghnad expresses the loneliness and
solitude of the character in an unattached, inaccessible manner sitting in the
left flank of the stage in those 22/23 minutes of his monologue. He
deconstructs himself as well as the character in a semi-realistic, postmodern
way. It is an ideal example of executing Stanislavsky’s emotion memory and
imagination process.
Arna has
put in an element of passivity that beautifully expresses the introvert nature
of the character. All through the monologue of the old man Sukanya Chakraborty
sits still, and that demands kudos.
A totally
verbose play, though the type of verbosity that we encounter in a solo
performed play or the form of dialogue we are accustomed to is not to be found
here. The dialogues are accompanied by projections of some pictures and
portions of some old nostalgic songs. The total mounting of the play gradually
moves the play to its peak with a gradually increasing rhythm. This keeps the
stage dynamic, in spite of very little movements. This post-postmodern design
of the play-maker creates a post-dramatic theatre which is a very rare genre in
our theatre world. And more so, the common viewers are yet to accept this.
So, in spite of recognizing the great need for such a theatre, I have had to admit that Debesh had taken a big risk in essaying this outstanding work.
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