Sansriti’s HAYBADAN
The adaptation
in Bengali by Shankha Ghosh has been kept unaltered by Debesh Chatterjee. This
for me posed a difficult situation to handle as a viewer. Let me explain my
predicament. Firstly, it is the content of the play that confronts the viewer
with some deeply philosophical questions. The German Nobel laureate Thomas Mann
had written a novella named ‘The Transposed Heads’ taking a cue from a tale in ‘Kathasaritsagara’,
that he had found in a book on Godess Kali by a German Indologist Heinrich
Zimmer; and Karnad had put a few queries in this 1971 play of his regarding the
real face of Man’s existence. Does his existence reside in his thinking, in his
intellect? Or it resides in his physique or in his physical identity? The basic
existential conflict between perfectness or completeness versus imperfectness
is at its basis. My second point of mental pressure was the language of the
play. A play transcreated by Shankha Ghosh will certainly have the magic of the
Bengali language, and would I be capable to enjoy the lyricality and flavour of
his language, and for that matter his choice of words, while I am in the
process of viewing the drama? Here I would like to further explain this fact
from what Shankha Ghosh had written about the failure of Bohurupee’s staging of
Tagore’s Bisarjan. He had said that the obsessive power of the poetic
language was a bar for the play to succeed on the stage. The third reason of my
anxiety was while enjoying the drama created on the stage by Debesh with all
his theatrical ingenuity, would it be possible for me to appreciate the two
topics mentioned earlier? With all these concerns at the back of my mind I sat
to see the play that evening in February at the Academy of Fine Arts, and was
simply swept away witnessing a perfect execution of the script.
As a freak
of Nature, the heads of the two friends, the poet Devdutta and the strong son
of an iron-smith, Kapila both of whom are in love with Padmini, gets
transposed. On the other hand, a horse-faced man wanting to become a complete
man, turns into a complete horse. The play begins with a Ganesha-vandana which
seemed to be the perfect intro for the play. The play ends with the man turning
into a perfect horse laughing his heart out and the baby son of Padmini feels
the air with his joyful laughter.
Karnad had
used the traditional folk form as his idiom for the play. Debesh did not try to
out smart Karnad by implementing other forms. He has kept Karnad’s form but has
used a style of his own in the mounting of the play. While Karnad used the traditional
Kannada folkplay form of Yakshagaana, Debesh has replaced it with the traditional
Dinajpur folkplay form of Khhan. He smoothly amalgamates the folk form with the
modern idioms of theatre. Music plays a very strong role in the drama, and it
has been excellently handled by Debesh himself. His scenography has been
immensely supported by Sudip Sanyal’s lights. Choreography by Piyali Dasgupta
and puppets by Sudip Gupta, together with dress designing by Anik Ghosh and
make-up by Md Ali need appreciation.
Acting by
every member was executed with sincerity. Tathagata Choudhury as Devdutta was
spontaneous in his diction and delivery. Abhra Mukherjee’s Kapil was equally
satisfying. Monalisa Chatterjee’s Padmini was quite a challenging role, and she
went through it with elan. The character’s relation with her husband and the
other person who happens to be her husband’s friend is not that one encounters
normally in films and stories. Padmini was never the reason for the
estrangement of the two friends, and Monalisa was quite alert not to make the
character of Padmini coquettish.
No comments:
Post a Comment