Playback theatre, Bengaluru

Last night, I was at a performance by Playback Theatre, Bengaluru, and this morning, the omniscient Wikipedia told me what it means: “Playback Theatre is an original form of improvisational theatre in which audience or group members tell stories from their lives and watch them enacted on the spot.”

Turning back a few pages, it was possibly in the 1980s when I watched some of Badal Sarkar’s plays after he took theatre out of the proscenium. During those performances, the audience used to sit on the four sides of a bare hall with zero props, with their backs to the wall and the actors were in the middle. They would directly interact with the audience and often, different men and women would play out different parts of the same play at the same time on two or more parts of the hall. It was an experience.

I do not remember all the Badal Sarkar plays that I lived through on the first floor of the Theosophical Society premises off College Street in Kolkata. It was a fascinating combination, some guys reportedly got in touch with ghosts on the ground floor, even as Badal Sarkar’s ruthless realism played out on the first floor. I watched Michil (Procession) and Bhoma, and a few others there. But what I experienced last night was even more fascinating, and in a moment, I’ll explain why.

There were four actors, three girls and a boy in their twenties, two musicians, a boy who played different instruments and a girl who played the guitar and sang beautifully. The seventh member of the team, the anchor person, got the audience involved in the performance. Last night’s proceedings began with a simple question “How do you feel now?”

A young man sitting next to me said he had taken four Uber rides during the day, and all the four drivers had been Muslims. He said that he hadn’t interacted much with two of them, but with the other two, both driver and the passenger ended up crying together. The moment he stopped, a girl was driving a taxi and the four actors performed the narrator’s experience with an incredible degree of understanding and sophistication. I was dumbstruck. How did they work so well without any preparation? Could they read each other’s mind?

From there, the compere moved on to how the audience felt (after three days of pogrom in Delhi). From there, the discursive conversation moved on to “resistance” and how individual members of the audience was initiated to the idea of resistance. Someone got the idea from penny-less, cast-away former freedom fighter in his early childhood, someone when she studied the Jim Crow Laws at a university in the US and related the caste system she had lived through as a child without ever realising there was anything wrong about it.

The brilliant ensemble brought to life each one of those experiences.

It was so heartening to see these young men and women, who have such depth and who have to offer so much to us. Once again, I thought we must not lose hope. Our future is bright!

Thursday, 27 February 2020

Meghnadbadh Kabya: A super rendition

Meghnadbadh Kabya (Slaying of Meghnad) was the most significant literary work by the greatest flawed genius of Bangla literature, Michael Madhusudan Dutta (1824–1873). It was published in 1861, the year Rabindranath Tagore was born.

To briefly explain the qualifier “flawed genius”, right since his days in Hindu College (Presidency College later), there was plenty of evidence of Madhusudan’s literary talent. But he was also snooty, quite shamelessly opportunistic (he converted to Christianity not out of faith, but to cadge a ticket to England from the colonial masters), and famously undisciplined. Thanks to his luxurious lifestyle and lack of self-restraint, Madhusudan went through long spells of penury and ultimately, drank himself to death. Had it not been for the consistent financial and moral support from Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar – who I believe was among the three greatest Bengalis in modern history – Michael possibly would have died much earlier, and Bangla literature would have been poorer.

Meghnadbadh Kabya, a tragic long verse in nine cantos, is exceptionally brilliant both in terms of its content and literary style.

In this poem, Michael looks at an episode from the Ramayana from a contrarian perspective. Indrajit, also known as Meghnad, was Ravana’s son and a great warrior. He had almost killed Rama and Lakshmana twice.

But in the morning just before he was to join the battle, while he was worshiping Shiva in the royal temple of Lanka, Laxman entered the palace “like a thief” with the help Bivisana, one of Ravana’s brothers. Meghnad welcomed Laxman as a guest, but rebuked him for being such a coward and asked him not to fight an unarmed man. But Lakshman killed his defenceless enemy anyway, making a mockery of the so-called “kshatriya dharma”.

A proof of literary genius is that catch phrases used by great writers become idioms in their language. Meghnadbadh Kabya in particular and Madhusudan’s poetry in general abounds with such gems. Here’s one that my mother often quoted when she had to refer to a troublesome adversary:

Raban swoshur momo, Meghnad swami, amiki dorai sakhi bhikari Raghabe?

Ravana is my father-in-law, Meghnad my husband, could I be scared of that beggar Raghava?

Michael once wrote:

Kato je aishwarya tabo e bhabo mandole

Sei jane, banee pado dhare je mastake

What treasures abound

In your boundless universe,

Know only those,

Who’ve embraced the feet

Of the Goddess of Letters.

Watching fine plays (and films) too is embracing the feet of the Goddess of Learning. And last night, I discovered a new treasure trove: The theatre group Naye Natua and Gautam Halder’s rendition of Madhusudan’s epic verse at the Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata.

It was two hours and twenty minutes of solo-acting by Gautam, supported by two drummers and four other musicians, every one of them joining in chorus too. Gautam recited and sang, acted and danced while effortlessly transiting from one character to another, playing every character of the story including both the combatants Meghnad and Laxman, with effortless ease but with tremendous passion and physical exertion.

If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have known that such performance was humanly possible on stage. And the beauty of the performance was that he hadn’t left out even one word of the original. Michael Madhusudan’s language contains lots of Sanskrit words and even educated Bengalis may not follow it entirely. But despite that, Gautam and his team kept the audience spell-bound, no one – well almost no one – moved or checked their stupid cell phones during the performance.

It was a captivating show, and almost flawless. After many years I was watching a play at the Academy of Fine Arts with every seat occupied. For average performances, there are 20 to 200 viewers and it was indeed heart-warming to notice that fine performance is still appreciated in a city where ignorance is bliss officially, filthy language is heard everywhere, and uncouth behaviour is considered normal.

I’ve been watching plays since when titans like Sambhu Mitra, Ajitesh Bandyopadhyaya, and Utpal Dutta straddled the theatre stages in Bengal. After their departure, there was an inevitable period of lull, and personally, I lost touch with the Bangla theatre as I moved away.

Yesterday, I realised that the tradition of Bangla theatre is very much alive. The flame burns with equal brightness and the pursuit of the pinnacle of excellence continues unabated.

19 November 2017

Photo of Michael Madhusudan Dutta courtesy: Wikipedia: By Unknown - Archive, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51736483

Picture of the stage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwBWXwJgUns