Akdin Mandire Jaoar Pathe: An outstanding production of Sansriti

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.